The Big Clock

by Kenneth Fearing

  THE BIG CLOCK

  Kenneth Fearing

  First published in 1946

  For Nan

  George Stroud I

  I FIRST met Pauline Delos at one of those substantial parties Earl Janoth liked to give every two or three months, attended by members of the staff, his personal friends, private moguls, and public nobodies, all in haphazard rotation. It was at his home in the East Sixties. Although it was not exactly public, well over a hundred people came and went in the course of two or three hours.

  Georgette was with me, and we were introduced at once to Edward Orlin of Futureways, and to others in the group who had the familiar mark upon them. Of Pauline Delos, I knew only the name. But although there could not have been anyone in the organization who hadn’t heard a great deal about the lady, there were few who had actually seen her, and fewer still who had ever seen her on any occasion when Janoth was also present. She was tall, ice-blonde, and splendid. The eye saw nothing but innocence, to the instincts she was undiluted sex, the brain said here was a perfect hell.

  “Earl was asking about you a moment ago,” Orlin told me. “Wanted you to meet somebody.”

  “I was delayed. As a matter of fact, I’ve just finished a twenty-minute conversation with President McKinley.”

  Miss Delos looked mildly interested. “Who did you say?” she asked.

  “William McKinley. Our twenty-fourth President.”

  “I know,” she said, and smiled. A little. “You probably heard a lot of complaints.”

  A man I recognized as Emory Mafferson, a tiny little dark fellow who haunted one of the lower floors, Futureways, also, I think, spoke up.

  “There’s a guy with an iron face like McKinley’s in the auditing department. If that’s who you mean, you bet there were complaints.”

  “No. I was truly and literally detained in a conversation with Mr. McKinley. At the bar of the Silver Lining.”

  “He was,” said Georgette. “I was, too.”

  “Yes. And there were no complaints at all. Quite the contrary. He’s making out quite well, it seems.” I had myself another Manhattan from a passing tray. “He’s not under a contract, of course. But working steadily. In addition to being McKinley he’s sometimes Justice Holmes, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ward Beecher, or anyone important but dignified. He’s been Washington, Lincoln, and Christopher Columbus more times than he can remember.”

  “I call him a very convenient friend to have,” said Delos. “Who is he?”

  “His earthly alias is Clyde Norbert Polhemus. For business purposes. I’ve known him for years, and he’s promised to let me be his understudy.”

  “What’s he done?” Orlin asked, with reluctance. “Sounds like he materialized a bunch of ghosts, and can’t put them back.”

  “Radio,” I said. “And he can put anyone anywhere.”

  And that was about all, the first time I met Pauline Delos. The rest of the late afternoon and early evening passed as always in this comfortable little palace, surrounded as it was by the big and little palaces of greater and lesser kingdoms than Janoth Enterprises. Old conversation in new faces. Georgette and I met and talked to the niece of a department store. Of course the niece wanted to conquer new territory. She would inherit several acres of the old territory, anyway. I met a titan in the world of mathematics; he had connected a number of adding machines into a single unit, and this super-calculator was the biggest in the world. It could solve equations unknown to and beyond the grasp of its inventor. I said: “That makes you better than Einstein. When you have your equipment with you.”

  He looked at me uneasily, and it occurred to me I was a little drunk.

  “I’m afraid not. It was a purely mechanical problem, developed for special purposes only.”

  I told him he might not be the best mathematician on earth but he was certainly the fastest, and then I met a small legal cog in a major political engine. And next Janoth’s latest invention in the way of social commentators. And others, all of them pretty damned important people, had they only known it. Some of them unaware they were gentlemen and scholars. Some of them tomorrow’s famous fugitives from justice. A sizable sprinkling of lunatics, so plausible they had never been suspected and never would be. Memorable bankrupts of the future, the obscure suicides of ten or twenty years from now. Potentially fabulous murderers. The mothers or fathers of truly great people I would never know.

  In short, the big clock was running as usual, and it was time to go home. Sometimes the hands of the clock actually raced, and at other times they hardly moved at all. But that made no difference to the big clock. The hands could move backward, and the time it told would be right just the same. It would still be running as usual, because all other watches have to be set by the big one, which is even more powerful than the calendar, and to which one automatically adjusts his entire life. Compared to this hook-up, the man with the adding machines was still counting on his fingers.

  Anyway, it was time I collected Georgette and went home. I always go home. Always. I may sometimes detour, but eventually I get there. Home was 37.4 miles, according to the railroad timetable, but it could be 3,740 miles, and I would still make it. Earl Janoth had emerged from somewhere, and we said good-bye.

  There was one thing I always saw, or thought I saw, in Janoth’s big, pink, disorderly face, permanently fixed in a faint smile he had forgotten about long ago, his straight and innocent stare that didn’t, any more, see the person in front of him at all. He wasn’t adjusting himself to the big clock. He didn’t even know there was a big clock. The large, gray, convoluted muscle in back of that childlike gaze was digesting something unknown to the ordinary world. That muscle with its long tendons had nearly fastened itself about a conclusion, a conclusion startlingly different from the hearty expression once forged upon the outward face, and left there, abandoned. Some day that conclusion would be reached, the muscle would strike. Probably it had, before. Surely it would, again.

  He said how nice Georgette was looking, which was true, how she always reminded him of carnivals and Hallowe’en, the wildest baseball ever pitched in history, and there was as usual a real and extraordinary warmth in the voice, as though this were another, still a third personality.

  “I’m sorry an old friend of mine, Major Conklin, had to leave early,” he said to me. “He likes what we’ve been doing recently with Crimeways. I told him you were the psychic bloodhound leading us on to new interpretations, and he was interested.”

  “I’m sorry I missed him.”

  “Well, Larry recently took over a string of graveyard magazines, and he wants to do something with them. But I don’t think a man with your practical experience and precision mentality could advise him. He needs a geomancer.”

  “It’s been a pleasant evening, Earl.”

  “Hasn’t it? Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  We made our way down the long room, past an atmospheric disturbance highly political, straight through a group of early settlers whom God would not help tomorrow morning, cautiously around a couple abruptly silent but smiling in helpless rage.

  “Where now?” Georgette asked.

  “A slight detour. Just for dinner. Then home, of course.”

  As we got our things, and I waited for Georgette, I saw Pauline Delos, with a party of four, disappearing into the night. Abandoning this planet. As casually as that. But my thought-waves told her to drop in again. Any time.

  In the taxi, Georgette said: “George, what’s a geomancer?”

  “I don’t know, George. Earl got it out of the fattest dictionary ever printed, wrote it on his cuff, and now the rest of us know why he’s the boss. Remind me to look it up.”

  Geor
ge Stroud II

  ABOUT five weeks later I woke up on a January morning, with my head full of a letter Bob Aspenwell had written me from Haiti. I don’t know why this letter came back to me the instant sleep began to go. I had received it days and days before. It was all about the warmth down there, the ease, and above all, the simplicity.

  He said it was a Black Republic, and I was grinning in my sleep as I saw Bob and myself plotting a revolt of the whites determined not to be sold down the river into Crimeways. Then I really woke up.

  Monday morning. On Marble Road. An important Monday.

  Roy Cordette and I had scheduled a full staff conference for the April issue, one of those surprise packages good for everyone’s ego and imagination. The big clock was running at a leisurely pace, and I was well abreast of it.

  But that morning, in front of the mirror in the bathroom, I was certain a tuft of gray on the right temple had stolen at least another quarter-inch march. This renewed a familiar vision, beginning with mortality at one end of the scale, and ending in senile helplessness at the other.

  Who’s that pathetic, white-haired old guy clipping papers at the desk over there? asked a brisk young voice. But I quickly tuned it out and picked another one: Who’s that distinguished, white-haired, scholarly gentleman going into the directors’ room?

  Don’t you know who he is? That’s George Stroud.

  Who’s he?

  Well, it’s a long story. He used to be general manager of this whole railroad. Railroad? Why not something with a farther future? Airline. He saw this line through its first, pioneer stages. He might have been one of the biggest men in aviation today, only something went wrong. I don’t know just what, except that it was a hell of a scandal. Stroud had to go before a Grand Jury, but it was so big it had to be hushed up, and he got off. After that, though, he was through. Now they let him put out the papers and cigars in the board room when there’s a meeting. The rest of the time he fills the office inkwells and rearranges the travel leaflets.

  Why do they keep him on at all?

  Well, some of the directors feel sentimental about the old fellow, and besides, he has a wife and daughter dependent on him. Hold that copy, boy. This is years and years from now. Three children, no, I think it’s four. Brilliant youngsters, and awfully brave about Stroud. Won’t hear a word against him. They think he still runs the whole works around here. And did you ever see the wife? They’re the most devoted old couple I ever saw.

  Drying my face, I stared into the glass. I made the dark, bland, somewhat inquisitive features go suddenly hard and still. I said:

  “Look here, Roy, we’ve really got to do something.” About what? “About getting ourselves some more money.” I saw the vague wave of Roy Cordette’s thin, long-fingered hand, and discerned his instant retreat into the land of elves, hobgoblins, and double-talk.

  I thought, George, you went all over this with Hagen three months ago. There’s no doubt about it, you and I are both crowding the limit. And then some.

  “What is the limit, do you happen to know?”

  The general level throughout the whole organization, I should say, wouldn’t you?

  “Not for me. I don’t exactly crave my job, my contract, or this gilded cage full of gelded birds. I think it’s high time we really had a showdown.”

  Go right ahead. My prayers go with you.

  “I said we. In a way it involves your own contract as well as mine.”

  I know. Tell you what, George, why don’t the three of us talk this over informally? You and Hagen and myself?

  “A good idea.” I reached for the phone. “When would be convenient?”

  You mean today?

  “Why not?”

  Well, I’ll be pretty busy this afternoon. But all right. If Steve isn’t too busy around five.

  “A quarter to six in the Silver Lining. After the third round. You know, Jennett-Donohue are planning to add five or six new books. We’ll just keep that in mind.”

  So I heard, but they’re on a pretty low level, if you ask me. Besides, it’s a year since that rumor went around.

  A real voice shattered this imaginary scene.

  “George, are you ever coming down? George has to take the school bus, you know.”

  I called back to Georgette that I was on my way and went back to the bedroom. And when we went into conference with Steve Hagen, then what? A vein began to beat in my forehead. For business purposes he and Janoth were one and the same person, except that in Hagen’s slim and sultry form, restlessly through his veins, there flowed some new, freakish, molten virulence.

  I combed my hair before the bedroom dresser, and that sprout of gray resumed its ordinary proportions. To hell with Hagen. Why not go to Janoth? Of course.

  I laid the comb and brush down on the dresser top, leaned forward on an elbow, and breathed into the mirror: “Cut you the cards, Earl. Low man leaves town in twenty-four hours. High man takes the works.”

  I put on my tie, my coat, and went downstairs. Georgia looked up thoughtfully from the usual drift of cornflakes surrounding her place at the table. From beneath it came the soft, steady, thump, thump, thump of her feet marking time on a crossbar. A broad beam of sunlight poured in upon the table, drawn close to the window, highlighting the silverware, the percolator, the faces of Georgia and Georgette. Plates reflected more light from a sideboard against one wall, and above it my second favorite painting by Louise Patterson, framed in a strip of walnut, seemed to hang away up in the clouds over the sideboard, the room, and somehow over the house. Another picture by Patterson hung on the opposite wall, and there were two more upstairs.

  Georgette’s large, glowing, untamed features turned, and her sea-blue eyes swept me with surgical but kindly interest. I said good morning and kissed them both. Georgette called to Nellie that she could bring the eggs and waffles.

  “Orange juice,” I said, drinking mine. “These oranges just told me they came from Florida.”

  My daughter gave me a glance of startled faith. “I didn’t hear anything,” she said.

  “You didn’t? One of them said they all came from a big ranch near Jacksonville.”

  Georgia considered this and then waved her spoon, flatly discarding the whole idea. After a full twenty seconds of silence she seemed to remember something, and asked: “What man were you talking to?”

  “Me? Man? When? Where?”

  “Now. Upstairs. George said you were talking to a man. We heard.”

  “Oh.”

  Georgette’s voice was neutral, but under the neutrality lay the zest of an innocent bystander waiting to see the first blood in a barroom debate.

  “I thought you’d better do your own explaining,” she said.

  “Well, that man, George. That was me, practicing. Musicians have to do a lot of practicing before they play. Athletes have to train before they race, and actors rehearse before they act.” I hurried past Georgette’s pointed, unspoken agreement. “And I always run over a few words in the morning before I start talking. May I have the biscuits. Please?”

  Georgia weighed this, and forgot about it. She said: “George said you’d tell me a story, George.”

  “I’ll tell you a story, all right. It’s about the lonely cornflake.” I had her attention now, to the maximum. “It seems that once there was a little girl.”

  “How old?”

  “About five, I think. Or maybe it was seven.”

  “No, six.”

  “Six she was. So there was this package of cornflakes—”

  “What was her name?”

  “Cynthia. So these cornflakes, hundreds of them, they’d all grown up together in the same package, they’d played games and gone to school together, they were all fast friends. Then one day the package was opened and the whole lot were emptied into Cynthia’s bowl. And she poured milk and cream and sugar in the bowl, and then she ate one of the flakes. And after a while, this cornflake down in Cynthia’s stomach began to wonder when the rest of his friends
were going to arrive. But they never did. And the longer he waited, the lonelier he grew. You see, the rest of the cornflakes got only as far as the tablecloth, a lot of them landed on the floor, a few of them on Cynthia’s forehead, and some behind her ears.”

  “And then what?”

  “Well, that’s all. After a while this cornflake got so lonely he just sat down and cried.”

  “Then what’d he do?”

  “What could he do? Cynthia didn’t know how to eat her cornflakes properly, or maybe she wasn’t trying, so morning after morning the same thing happened. One cornflake found himself left all alone in Cynthia’s stomach.”

  “Then what?”

  “Well, he cried and carried on so bad that every morning she got a bellyache. And she couldn’t think why because, after all, she really hadn’t eaten anything.”

  “Then what’d she do?”

  “She didn’t like it, that’s what she did.”

  Georgia started in on her soft-boiled eggs, which promised to go the way of the cereal. Presently she lowered the handle of the spoon to the table and rested her chin on the tip, brooding and thumping her feet on the crossbar. The coffee in my cup gently rippled, rippled with every thud.

  “You always tell that story,” she remembered. “Tell me another.”

  “There’s one about the little girl—Cynthia, aged six—the same one—who also had a habit of kicking her feet against the table whenever she ate. Day after day, week in and week out, year after year, she kicked it and kicked it. Then one fine day the table said, ‘I’m getting pretty tired of this,’ and with that it pulled back its leg and whango, it booted Cynthia clear out of the window. Was she surprised.”

  This one was a complete success. Georgia’s feet pounded in double time, and she upset what was left of her milk.

  “Pull your punches, wonder boy,” said Georgette, mopping up. A car honked outside the house and she polished Georgia’s face with one expert wipe of the bib. “There’s the bus, darling. Get your things on.”