by Philip Wylie
"Interested!" The youth yelled the word. "Look! I'm mixed up, now! If you mean what I think you do--I believe I get it! I never did have one of those long talks about what went wrong--with Sarah. I don't like scenes, and she was so darn mean and icy the last time I saw her, I got hurt about it--and walked out. You think it would make any difference if she didn't know--and then did?" Jimmie could hear him swallow on the end of that.
"I'll see."
"Will you call me back, then? Hell! How can a fellow go and toot a clarinet, wondering about a thing like that--after he's tried to quit wondering for a whole, long lot of months!"
"I'll call you, Harry."
Jimmie hung up. "Now--Sarah," he said to Audrey. "I like the way this Harry talks."
"Jimmie! I--look. Can I call Sarah?"
"Why, sure!" He smiled quietly. "The woman's gentler technique?"
"Not that. But I thought--if we've guessed right about this--then telling Sarah will be doing her a big favor."
"What do you want to do her a favor for?"
"So she'll know I'm not mad that she read my diaries."
Audrey was dialing. Jimmie slid behind her, and for a moment weltered in the thought that this was the essence of generosity. Then there came another thought--another possible face to put on Audrey's deed: this was also the essence of a smart tactic. If Sarah were overcome with the news, overcome with joy--then, all the secrets in Audrey's diaries would be forever secure.
Audrey's father worked people that way, apparently.
Jimmie tried to shake off the suspicion--and he could not; although Audrey's words, and her behavior, seemed to deny the truth of such a construction.
"Hello? Miss Bailey, please . . . a friend . . . personal . . . Hello? Sarah? . . . This is Audrey Wilson . . . Hey! I know you don't want to talk to me . . . But I want to talk to you
. . . No, not about Jimmie . . . about Harry."
Then, in a clear and gentle tone, Audrey told all about Harry--and the notion she and Jimmie had discussed. After that Sarah talked for several minutes. Jimmie could not hear a word. He heard, only, the low, intense pitch of his sister's voice. But he did see that Audrey began nodding. And she sniffled once.
At last she spoke again: "No, Sarah . . . I wouldn't do it tonight . . . no train and you couldn't pack . . . Just phone him at the hotel . . . Yes . . . He certainly is expecting a call! Good night, darling . . . I'm glad--you feel like that!"
Audrey hung up. She buried her face in her hands for a moment. "That," she said presently, with a sigh, "is probably a new high of some sort in marriage proposals. Sarah didn't know. Said she might have heard once--and forgotten. But I think she just didn't know. She was going to start for Chicago tonight. I advised her not to. But I bet Harry will start, tonight, for Muskogewan! And there will be merry hell to pay around town tomorrow! Wow!" Audrey laughed delightedly. She turned in the booth, hugged Jimmie, and she kissed him, lightly. "We've done a good deed that'll last quite a while. Two lifetimes, maybe."
"You're a nice woman, Audrey."
"Yeah. In a peculiar way--I am. Glad you found it out."
"I--I--went back--that night--to Dan's house. Did you hear me?"
Silence. "Went--back?" she whispered.
"Yes."
"Oh, Jimmie! But you didn't knock!"
"No. The house was dark and I could hear you--either crying or laughing--I couldn't be sure--"
"Laughing!"
"I couldn't tell--"
"Jimmie Bailey, did you even think, for one second I was laughing? Is that what you thought? And you sneaked away again! Laughing!! Does a girl who yanks out the lights and throws herself on a divan and practically chokes to death on tears for two hours sound like she was laughing! No kidding, Jimmie! I'm disappointed in you--terribly. And a telephone booth is no place to have our first quarrel! What does a girl have to do to convince you she's mad about you, anyhow?"
Audrey pushed the door open. Jimmie stepped out, shakily. She followed, disheveled and damp from the warmth of the booth, and the anxiety of the calls, and the intense if vicarious emotion. Several people turned to look at them. The conclave on the porch had come to an end. Among those people was Audrey's father. He nodded to Jimmie. He deliberately cut his daughter.
"I want to leave," Audrey said. "I've got Dan's car. Oh, Jimmie, I wish you had knocked! I don't know if I can ever forgive you for thinking I might have been--
laughing."
"You going to Dan's still? It's late."
"I live there."
" Live there!"
She walked across the foyer. The doorman produced her raincoat and umbrella.
"Certainly. We've kept it quiet, but it's bound to spread around, sometime. Didn't you see the affectionate regard with which Dad greeted me? Didn't I tell you he'd throw me out for seeing you? Well, I told him I was going to--and he did throw me out. So Dan and Adele have given me sanctuary. And Mother, I understand, has taken to her bed."
Jimmie said, "Hey! Wait! You can't leave now!"
She smiled and whispered, "Night, Jimmie." The man opened the big front door.
Wind skirled like bagpipes. Her skirts rippled. A sheet of rain splashed across the porch.
The door closed with a solemn bang.
CHAPTER XII
AGAIN, THE WEEKS ground. Jimmie felt like a hard lump in a dull-edged mill.
No word from Audrey. He had taken to chasing her, failed to catch up, and decided that this was a new act. Flight. Dan and Adele were always polite, on the phone or at the door.
She'd gone out--they didn't know where. She'd run up to Chicago for the week end. Out.
Away. He hunted for her among her friends without success. He wrote a note to her. No answer. So he quit. The kind of game she played was too intensive, too unfunny, too exhausting. He heard that she had flown East, finally. Visiting somebody in the Carolinas.
Biff came home. Jimmie heard all about that, too, from the rant and waggle of Muskogewan tongues. Biff was healed--even could drive a car. But he was not well. The accident must have injured his head, or something, they said. Jimmie was worried about that--until he heard the rest of the story. Biff couldn't sleep, had terrible headaches, demanded constant care. And so--he'd brought home a special nurse.
Genevieve, of course.
Jimmie smiled wryly inside himself. Outwardly, he shook his head and said it was too bad. He wondered what his father and mother would do if they found out the reason for Biff's malingering. Dalliance. The moron!
The one bright spot in all that creep of time was a mere flash: Sarah's call, with Harry--to introduce a new husband and rapturously to thank an older brother. Sarah's good looks were that day organized into meaning. All the meaning was focused on Harry.
He was a nice chap, Jimmie thought. Humorous, clever, and violently but adroitly in love with his wife. They stopped at the club for a quarter of an hour and hurried away--in the midst of laughter. Honeymoon on the West Coast. From the rice-dripping new roadster, Sarah yelled to Jimmie, "Tell Audrey we love her to pieces! We couldn't reach her or we'd have had her at the wedding!" Gears meshing. Tires slipping. Old shoes kicking on the gravel.
That was all. His work was going badly. Three weeks to learn that a process was misconceived. Another three, before that, spent only to be beaten to the same objective by a Czech chemist in New York.
Then the letter came.
A letter opened by the Censor. A letter from Froggie, in the lab, in London.
Jimmie snatched it from the desk clerk and vaulted up to his room, where the chintz curtains stood bright and stiff against a backdrop of muddy fairways, snow blotches, and the hanging smoke of far-off freight car locomotives.
"DEAR JIMMIE:
"We discovered last night that not one of us had written you yet. Covered the whole staff with humiliation. Now we've set up a routine. Drew lots--I'm first on the list--
drank you a ripping toast, the gist of which I will not tell you because, I understand, the censor
s are sometimes ladies--and you ought to get word from the Smythe Lab regularly now.
"I was about to say that there wasn't much news and no change to speak of. But I looked at the calendar--back over the time between the party we threw for your going-away at the Ritz, and now--and there's quite a packet of news, after all. It's a long time, these days. Binnie got it. Went over with some new--" the next line was missing from the letter--"and the flack caught him over a town you have seen, which the Russians would have called H in their dispatches. The bomb load blew--so it was quick and painless.
"Sommes is minus the left pinkie--very proud of it--thinks they ought to decorate him. He stirred up one of those fabulous messes he is famous for--the kind you used to call 'blue sky' chemistry--and it didn't precisely explode, but it got hot and spattery and a chunk of it burned away the pinkie neatly at the second joint. We gave him a little dinner at Gigli's last week, and had the dessert served with ladyfingers Gigli himself baked, the replica of the missing digit--very realistic--said patisserie requiring no end of food coupons. Great success. Pinkie made a speech about the Empire and so on after the sixth double brandy--the last, incidentally. Very fine oration--and cribbed, in toto, it later proved, from an early treatise by the PM. Serious little blighter, but a lot of chemist. Girls dancing attendance at the affair: Maude, Ginger, Tess, Evelyn, Daisy, Rochelle, and Therese. Missed you--had an empty chair with a stuffed chimp in it for your proxy.
'That's all our casualties. Over at the field, there's--" more words were missing--'and the list, since your time, is this: Gone--Waite, Petherbey, Pondonce, Bruntie, Tavis, Evans.
Prisoners of war--Cochrane, Simms, Bort, Crummin. In the hosp. and slated to pull out in decent shape--Tedwell and Melby. In the hosp, and not to pull out much--Coates, with burns, and Timmens, all broken up like matchsticks.
"Guess you knew most of them. It's depressing and maybe you'd rather not have the list, but we all decided you'd prefer to know. We've been giving the Jerries raw hell, in stepped-up doses, for a long while now, and the hell comes at a high price, both ways--
which you're aware of anyhow and I'm an idiot for saying.
"Cullen had an argument with Betsy Pell in the tea garden the other day. She poured a whole tray of dishes over his bean. Sommes went under the table like a fancy diver--thought the clatter was some new present from Jerry. Cullen brushed off the crockery and caught Betsy with a siphon--full on. They're apart, now. Evelyn got Cullen on the rebound. And Betsy got Evelyn's Edgar. Which will calm down life in the university set here for the winter, as you can imagine.
"Davis hasn't come out of his cubicle for a week and a half--they sent in a cot and food goes through the door, regularly. So we're all expecting something big any minute.
You know what he was working on, and there's about ten quid up, all told, on whether he gets it or not. If the answer is yes, and if I were a Berliner, I'd leave the city for the Christmas holidays--and stay away for the next year or two.
'Meanwhile 500 kgs. of Jerry's best caught the west wing of the old lab last Thursday night. Nobody in it, thank God. Just a stray ship with one big bomb--and a lucky hit, I think, though the head insists it was the result of a fifth column steer. Nothing undone we can't do over. If you find time, drop us a note about America. Any little thing you think of--how it feels not to have a war going on and a blitz around the corner every second. Send a snapshot of your ugly phiz. We haven't one, we find, to our dismay. There are forty-odd million of us on this not-so-right and certainly not-tight-little-isle, who get misty these days thinking about your America. If there was a song called 'God Bless the Yankees' it would damned near replace 'God Save the King'--certainly rival it. I know you don't like tosh, but can't restrain a note of it. I saw one of your convoys come in at--
you may guess where--a fortnight ago, and I jolly well cheered myself into a laryngitis.
Well, God help the Boche--and Merry Christmas, for when it rolls around.
"Yours,
"FROGGIE WILLIAMSON."
Jimmie read the letter six or seven times. Each time he stopped at the lists of names and eyed them, individually. The lowering dark came down. He sat by his window, dry-eyed, until past dinnertime--alone, overwhelmed with recollections, nostalgia, affection.
Toward ten o'clock he went downstairs and sat at a table in the cellar bar. He had a sandwich and some beer and coffee. Upstairs in the main dining room an orchestra was playing and the Saturday crowd danced tirelessly. The long brown beams that supported the floor seemed to bend perceptibly with each accent of the music and the feet of the people making an incessant, treading sound. The effect was maddening. After Jimmie had finished his coffee he went back up the stairs. To reach his rooms he had to pass through the foyer. On an impulse he looked into the salon. He was going to write an answer to Froggie's letter and he wondered what the fellows at Smythe's Laboratories would think if they could be hanging over his shoulder, watching these people enjoy themselves--well clad, stuffed with food, at peace, and not wanting war so fiercely they could not see the witless willfulness of this war.
Jimmie decided the fellows would be scared by the sight. It would make them bitter. Then they'd try to laugh it off. Try to apologize for the mood and the attitude of the people on this dance floor, because these people, alone, sustained them.
He was vaguely surprised to see his brother at one of the side tables. Jimmie looked for Genevieve, but she was not with Biff. Not there at all, evidently. Biff had another girl. He was holding her hand under the table and the girl was nodding. Girls would always be holding Biff's hand under tables--and nodding, Jimmie thought. This was a young girl. Seventeen, maybe only sixteen. She had dazzling blue eyes and yellow hair, and her thrill at possessing such an escort was rendered by vehement effort into an almost tangible determination to look sophisticated, to act sophisticated, to be sophisticated--no matter what.
Jimmie went away from the door.
The radiator in his room was clanking. He fussed with it for a while and managed to exchange the clank for a hiss-and-dribble. Then he sat down to instruct his mind in the exact mood required for the writing of a letter to the fellows. It took a long time to choose a mood. Afterward he moved to the wicker desk and made a score of false starts.
He had barely got into a proper swing when there was a sharp knock on his door.
"Come in!" he called.
It was one of the club stewards. "There's a fire!" he said, excitedly. "Mr. Gleason sent me up to tell you! They think it's the paint works!"
Jimmie streaked from his room and down the corridor. He turned right in its "L"
and came to the window at the end. He yanked up the blind. He saw a glow in the night-pinkish orange-lighting distant houses and the groomed contours of the golf course. One of the buildings--he did not know which--had caught fire. He whirled and made for his room. He seized his coat and hat. On the way down the main staircase he realized that he would have to call a cab. He had thought of swiping a car. But he remembered that he was unfamiliar with the new models. He would spend more time fiddling with gadgets than a taxi would need to get there.
He raced past the dining room and slid to a stop. Biff was inside. Biff could drive.
He went back. They were dancing; the lights had been lowered. Jimmie forced his way through the warm, perfumed resentment. He spotted the yellow-haired girl first, cheek to cheek with Biff, standing almost motionless. He grabbed his brother's arm.
"Hey! There's a fire at the plant! Run me down, will you?"
Biff emerged from a trance. "Oh, hello, Jimmie. What? I will like hell! This is my first real night out."
"Come on. I can't drive. Take a half hour to get a local cab. I need help."
The girl said, "Don't go, Biff!" so passionately that Jimmie's brother scowled. She had been too possessive, too demanding, for his taste. "Okay, Jimmie," he said. "Lead the way." He wiped the girl's face with his hand-downward. "Be back soon, Gracie. Wait for papa."
Like
a man who hears that a friend is hurt, without being told the details of the injury, Jimmie concentrated on the flickering glow that shone against the horizon. Was it the warehouse? The laboratories? The chemical storage tanks? The factory proper? The office building? He thought of Mr. Corinth and wondered if he were on the scene, or if he even knew about the fire; he considered telling Biff to stop so he could phone the old man at home. But the car went on. Jimmie felt, in some taut, impatient periphery of his brain, that Biff was driving at--only a moderate speed. That same dimension of his mind decided that Biff's accident had made him yellow about driving.
"Hurry up!" he said, without knowing that he had spoken.
Biff turned a corner, slowed for an intersection, and turned again, onto the boulevard that led out to the plant. It was not far. From the wide road Jimmie could descry the outline of the buildings in a black cutout against the blood-orange flame. Other cars were passing them, blowing horns. As they approached the property the night brightened--the lurid backdrop expanded--their ears were assaulted. Something had blown up.
There was no guard at the gate, which stood open. Already a file of cars waited their turn to enter. This circumstance filled Jimmie with a cruel rage--but there was nothing he could do about it. All Muskogewan was piling into family sedans and coupes and roaring out to the paint works to see the fun. Biff slowed to a crawl.
"Pull out of line!" Jimmie said. "Go around the fence, to the back!"
The scene was plain now. The fire, a great, incandescent glow, rose from the laboratories behind the mixing plant. In front of the long low building, on the weedy lawn, people parked their cars helter-skelter, jumped out, shouting to each other, and ran forward. From somewhere down the crammed road a fire engine wailed. Biff drove bumpily along the fence. The engine wailed again and a bell banged. Jimmie's flesh crept.
For one maniacal second he thought that he was not in Muskogewan, but in London, and this was where a bomb had fallen--that siren, the alert, and the bell, the fire engines that everlastingly ran through the raids.
Then it was plain again. He looked back. An in--pouring of cars was ripping down the wire fence, section by section. The people were coming to the holocaust as if to a game.