The Intruder

by Charles Beaumont

  “Almost as much fun as hunting!” He hadn’t meant to say it. But it was too late to stop now. “That’s it, isn’t it, Verne? You’ve been bored of everything for years, now there’s some excitement and you’re raring to go.”

  “No,” Shipman said slowly, “that isn’t it at all, as a matter of fact.”

  “I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to say.”

  “Yes.” Shipman relit his pipe and walked to the desk. “Whatever you think, Tom, it happens that I’m convinced. Maybe you don’t like the boy. That’s all right. But he’s opened my eyes, wide; and he’s shown me that he’s a leader. People listen to him.” He rummaged in the top drawer. “Have you seen this?”

  Tom took the photograph of the Negro kissing the white girl. He glanced at it and tossed it back. “I saw it ten years ago,” he said. “That thing’s been floating around since 1946. It was taken in Paris. The Negro is a G.I.”

  Shipman flushed. “Well, that doesn’t make any difference. The same sort of thing is going on in America, right now. It could just as easy go on in Caxton.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” Tom said. “What makes you so damn certain that the minute we have integration all the Negroes are going to start sleeping with the white women? Do you think these women are standing around, waiting for it to happen?”

  “That isn’t the point,” Shipman said.

  “Well, I don’t care what the point is. I just know this. We’ve done everything that can be done to keep integration out of Caxton, but the law says we’ve got to have it, and I believe in obeying the law. Cramer apparently doesn’t. I don’t like him; I don’t trust him and I am certainly not going to run his stinking ad. You can tell him that.” Tom got his hat and opened the door. “He seems to have forgotten that I’m the editor of the Messenger.”

  “You seem to have forgotten something along the way, too,” Shipman said.

  “What’s that, Verne?”

  “I own the controlling stock in the Messenger. You’re working for me.”

  “Well?”

  “I want the newspaper to support Adam Cramer and SNAP. All the way.”

  Tom looked at Shipman for several seconds. Then he said, “Before I took over as editor, the Messenger had a circulation of two thousand. It was coming out three times a month and losing money. Six months later the circulation was twelve thousand. Now it’s over twenty. We’re in the black. And we’ve won three prizes for outstanding journalism. In all that time, you never set foot in the office or even bothered to write me a letter. Are you going to tell me how to run a newspaper now?”

  Shipman wavered between uncertain anger and conciliation. “It isn’t that, Tom,” he said. “You’ve done a fine job, and I wouldn’t deny it. I’m not telling you how to run the newspaper . . .”

  “Then what are you telling me?”

  “It’s a matter of basic policy, that’s all. Plant a few ads, build up Cramer a little—hell, that can’t hurt.”

  “What if I refuse to run the ad? What if I tell you right now that I plan to do everything in my power to get rid of Cramer and his organization?”

  Shipman drew himself up unsteadily. “We’ve been friends for a good long time, Tom,” he said. “But if you told me that, I’d have to ask for your resignation.”

  “That’s the way it is?”

  “That’s the way it is.” Shipman hesitated. “Well?” he asked. “What are you going to do?”

  Tom thought of the job that was waiting for him in New York, then of Ruth and Ella, of his home, of the years that he had spent growing to love this town, this country.

  “I don’t seem to have much choice,” he said, and hated himself for saying it. He hated the weakness that had come over his legs. All the way to Shipman’s house he had told himself that he would lay it on the line. Things would be run his way, and if Shipman didn’t like it, he could get himself another boy.

  But then it had gone wrong.

  “All I ask, Tom,” Verne Shipman said, smiling, “is just a few little plugs. You’re still the editor!”

  The big man saw him to the front door, a thick arm resting on his shoulder.

  “We’ll have this rotten business cleaned up fast. You wait and see. Caxton is a town the world won’t soon forget!”

  Tom walked down the gravel path to his car, feeling as he had often felt years ago when he was young, struggling with a mind full of questions and no one in the world to answer the questions.

  On the way back to town, he thought again of Professor Cahier, and remembered, suddenly, a bushy-haired, nervous fellow named Lubin. The part of his mind that had pulled out the memory of those days before, apparently without purpose, kept forcing him back.

  Herman Lubin, laughing and untoughened then; a balding, staccato-voiced desk chief now. Lubin, the ambitious . . .

  “Thomas, you’re nuts. You’ll sit in that crummy little village all your life and maybe once or twice you’ll publish an editorial and they’ll shoot you an award—‘To the fighting editor of the Mouse Breath Bugle!’—and you’ll frame it and die happy. Stinko, Thomas. Small time. You’re too good a newspaperman for that.”

  Tom’s hands began to perspire against the glossy dark plastic steering wheel, as he realized now why he had been remembering.

  He mashed the accelerator pedal to the floor and kept it there for most of the length of the straight road. A few minutes later, in his office, he picked up the telephone and dialed long distance, noticing, with some annoyance, that his fingers had begun to tremble slightly.

  Fifteen minutes later, after a series of crackling pauses, poor connections, and transfers, he was talking to the man he’d corresponded with often but had not actually seen in over twenty years.

  Lubin’s greeting was loud. In the background, Tom could hear typewriters and other machines, and he had a quick, painful vision of the immense city room. “Chrissakes, man! You still got that houn-dawg accent? Jesus, I can’t believe it. Doesn’t anything change down there?”

  Tom smiled, without mirth, without real bitterness, with admission, only, that he was talking to newspaper and that he wasn’t newspaper. “Well,” he said, “we did get a new door for the privy.”

  The voice, distorted by distance, roared good-naturedly. “So,” Lubin said, “how the hell are you, anyway?”

  “Okay, Herman.”

  “Hard to tell, y’know. You Southroners all sound alike. Constipated. Ooop, hang on a second, Thomas—”

  While Lubin made some improbably enormous and important decision, Tom wiped his forehead and looked around his shabby, cluttered little office. He looked at the framed awards on the wall. The mountain of ads on the desk. The gritty, unmopped, unswept board floor.

  “Thomas?”

  “Yes, here, Herman.”

  “Sorry. Where were we? I know—you were about to tell me you’re fed up with all this country stuff and you want a job with me. Right?”

  Tom half-lowered the receiver, feeling the sharp, childish chill, the accelerated tempo of his heartbeat; then, quickly, he said: “I don’t know, Herman; I don’t know how I’d work out as a copy boy.”

  Again the roar. “Copy boy! Hell, man, I’m talking about something big. Really big. Night janitor! Right? Big. How’s the wife and kids?”

  “Fine. Herman—listen, before this phone bill goes so damn high I’ll have to up my sub rates—”

  “Country, typical country. Scared of telephones. Terrified of long distance.”

  “I have something serious to talk over with you.”

  “Should have known,” Lubin said. “You’re such a serious bastard. Always were. But insecure. . . . Go ahead.”

  “We’ve got a thing brewing here,” Tom said. “It could mean a little trouble or a lot, I can’t say yet. But it’s trouble.”

  “Don’t tell me. Mrs. Murgatroyd’s husband is cheating.”

  “Herman, goddamnit, shut up and listen, will you!”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  Tom cocked his
head and locked the receiver between his neck and shoulder and lit a cigarette. As quickly as he could, he told Lubin about Adam Cramer, about the speech, about the situation.

  When he’d finished, he realized how wild the story must sound to someone in New York. “It’s just starting,” he said, almost apologetically, “and maybe it’ll go nowhere, but I have a feeling. I have a feeling—”

  “What do you want me to do?” asked Lubin crisply, the humor gone from his voice.

  Tom wiped his palm against his trousers nervously. What did he want Lubin to do? “The kid says he comes from Los Angeles.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’ve got a man there, haven’t you?”

  “We’ve got a dozen men in L. A. But I don’t get—”

  “Is one of them available?”

  A bit impatiently, Lubin said, “Sure, of course.”

  “Good?”

  “Oh, come on now. What the hell is it you’re getting at?”

  “News,” Tom said. “A story. The kind your boss goes for. I want you to have a man run down some facts on this Cramer kid—”

  “K or C? Real name?”

  “C. I think so. I have a hunch something interesting might turn up.”

  “Like what?”

  Tom hesitated. “I don’t know, Herman,” he said. “It may all be a waste of time; but you can afford to waste a little time, can’t you?”

  “I guess so,” Lubin said casually. “Got a man named Driscoll, goes in for this kind of thing. Good boy: took a Pulitzer a few years back on the Nuremberg Trials—not for us. How about this? I’ll give him a ring and tell him to shoot a couple of days, just in case. Okay?”

  “No. Let me have until tomorrow. I’ll call you then with something more definite.”

  “Do that,” the voice said. “Maybe it’s something.” A pause, and: “Thomas, you’re sure you won’t change your mind about the job? Got a desk all warm for you.”

  “Keep it that way,” Tom said. “Before this is over, I may have to change my mind.”

  He replaced the telephone slowly. Perspiration coated his body in a thin, dripping film. The call had been a ridiculous impulse, and he seldom yielded to impulse these days. In a way, he was ashamed.

  Ashamed? he thought. Why?

  He sat quietly for a while; then, as if he had been holding his breath, he sighed and got up and went outside.

  He walked for almost an hour.

  12

  They marched across the glass-smooth clover in cowboy boots and ragged sneakers and shoes with little holes for ventilation. Eighteen men; five women; a dozen teen-age children, some with the look of acres and forests about their faces, some of a sharp and city cast. The men and women were frowning. They all carried lightweight sticks stripped from orange crates, and the sticks pierced squares of light cardboard.

  PATON YOU ARE A WEAKLING, read the signs. SEPARATE BUT EQUAL! WE DON’T WANT NIGRAS HERE! KEEP OUR SCHOOL WHITE!

  Bart Carey, walking in long, deliberate strides, headed the group. He was a large man with a Buddha belly and flabby, clay-brown arms. The spectacles he wore contrasted sharply with the rough and craglike features of his face; it was the spectacles you saw first. His shirt was transparent and sleeveless, wrinkled and stained with sweat. Somehow Carey gave the impression of having lived for years alone in some forgotten forest, of subsisting for this time on snakes and berries, of being rescued and returned to civilization, quickly shaved and bathed and dressed, and set before a hundred whirring cameras.

  Next to the dark young man in the trim suit who walked beside him, Carey seemed almost savage.

  Phil Dongen, who had left his assistant in charge of the store, jogged along fast enough to keep slightly ahead of Rev. Lorenzo Niesen.

  No one spoke.

  They marched across the lawn. When they reached the entrance to the high school, they stopped.

  “You want me to call him out?” Carey asked.

  Adam Cramer glanced at his wrist watch. “No,” he said, “wait a few minutes. It isn’t noon yet. We want everyone to hear this.”

  They waited quietly, holding their signs.

  Harley Paton stared at the large black 8-ball that had been given to him recently by a friend, and decided that it was the most appropriate gift he had ever received. He reached out and lifted the heavy object, rotated it, and read the fortune that appeared in a tiny slot at the bottom.

  Patience, it said, is a virtue.

  He set the ball down again and tried to concentrate on the papers, but this was impossible. He could think only of the telephone call that had wrested him from his bed at two a.m., and of the strained voice that told him he had betrayed the people of Caxton.

  Things had gone more smoothly than he’d expected. So far there had been no riots, no gangs, no fights. But there was something hanging heavy in the air. You could smell it. You could almost touch it.

  “Mr. Paton, are you busy?”

  He looked up. Agnes Angoff was standing in the doorway. “No,” he said. “Come in.”

  The English teacher closed the door angrily. “Have you looked outside your window?” she asked.

  Paton turned his chair, looked briefly, turned back again. “That’s the Cramer fellow, I suppose,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I heard about his speech last night. Tommy Finch told me. I think, Miss Angoff, that we are going to have some problems . . .”

  “I know we are. That’s why we ought to do something now. Things can work out—they can, I see that; don’t you? If we’re let alone. The new students are doing fine.”

  “That isn’t quite the report I get from Mrs. Gargan,” Harley Paton said, smiling.

  “That—” Agnes Angoff swallowed. “Mrs. Gargan gives me a swift pain. I’ve watched the children, and if they get the smallest chance, they’ll make it. We’ve got to do something!”

  The principal nodded. “I share your sentiments,” he said, “but there are those who say we’ve done too much already. What do you suggest?”

  “I don’t know.” Agnes Angoff sank into a chair. “I just don’t know. But if those . . . people . . . outside get what they’re after, we’ll be set back fifty years. That mustn’t happen.”

  She tried to control herself, but she had been controlling herself too long.

  Harley Paton felt suddenly embarrassed. He wanted to comfort the woman, tell her somehow that he understood; but he could only watch.

  “I was threatened last night,” she said. “If they’ll go that far—I know they must have called you too. Did they?”

  “Yes,” Harley Paton said, soberly. He recalled the droning words: “If you don’t want nothing to happen to your family, mister, you better get rid of them coons . . .”

  Agnes Angoff said: “Shouldn’t we—” Then the twelve o’clock bell began to shriek, and the halls filled up with noise.

  There was a knock at the door. Harley Paton opened it and faced a young boy in levis. It was John Christiansen, a freshman. His parents had called on Monday and said that they did not intend to allow their son to go to school with Negroes.

  “There’s a committee of citizens outside,” the boy said rhetorically. “They want you to meet them.”

  The principal looked at Miss Angoff. “All right, John,” he said. “Tell Mr. Cramer that I’ll be out shortly.”

  “Okay.”

  “John—”

  The boy stopped. “Yes, sir?”

  “Come here for a second. As I remember, John, we spent some time together last semester; it had something to do with failing grades. Do you recall?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I got to know you a little, then, and I thought you were a pretty good boy. I was honest about that. Will you be honest with me?”

  The boy looked frightened and embarrassed. “Sure,” he said hesitantly.

  Harley Paton said, “Fine. Now would you please tell me why you didn’t come to school yesterday.”

  John Christiansen squ
irmed. “Well, sir,” he said, “my pa didn’t want me to. On account of the nigras, you know. He didn’t want me to go to school with them.”

  “Was it your idea? That is, did you ask your father to call me?”

  “No, I didn’t do anything like that. He just called.”

  “In other words, it was his idea?”

  “Yeah. But—”

  Harley Paton smiled warmly. “And you didn’t mind getting out of a little school, either, did you?”

  “I gotta get back outside,” the boy said.

  “Just one more question. If your father hadn’t brought it up—I mean, if he hadn’t told you to stay home—would you have come?”

  “I guess so,” the boy said.

  Harley Paton looked at Miss Angoff meaningfully.

  “You better not say anything about my pa,” the boy said, “because he’s outside right now and he’s plenty sore.”

  “I’m not saying anything about him, John. You may leave now.”

  The boy turned and ran out the door.

  After a few moments, Harley Paton said, “Well, we might as well get this over with,” and he started down the hall.

  When he walked onto the stone steps, he looked suddenly very small and frail to Miss Angoff. Watching from her open window, watching the gathering crowd of children and the band of adults, and then turning her eyes to Harley Paton, she grew fearful.

  Paton was thin almost to the point of emaciation. His tonsured head seemed too heavy for the stemmed neck, and his clothes hung loosely from his light and bony frame. It was the expression on his face that saved him from looking either comical or pathetic. And the warmth of his smile intensified this grace.

  Now, however, he was not smiling. At his appearance, the children on their lunch period had quieted; and now they waited.

  In precise, nearly accentless tones, Harley Paton said, “You wanted to speak with me?”

  Adam Cramer stepped forward. “Yes. The people of Caxton want to know why you have allowed Negroes to mingle with their children in this school. We want an explanation.”

  Bart Carey jerked his head around. “That’s right,” he said loudly.

  “What about it?” others called.