by Philip Wylie
"It's after seven!"
"So 'tis. I'll run you home. I've got a jalopy that I keep just to see how long it can go without a visible reason. Your mother'll be burnt to a crisp!"
People were leaving, when Jimmie climbed out of the jalopy--women in furs, men in chesterfields. He ran up the steps, bumping past them. There were guests in the house, scores of them, but they had a straggler look. Several had drunk too many cocktails. A woman with an overwarm, oversoft face, a maternal face belied by sharp, acquisitive eyes, filled the front room with a belting cry, "Here's Jimmie, at last! My! Isn't he handsome!"
They came from every side. He wanted to run. But Biff put a glass in his hand.
And Sarah whispered, "Well, you ducked this one and made us pretty ashamed! But you won't escape Mother from now on--don't think you will!"
Then his mother was near. Her voice hissed. "Jimmie! Your trouser leg!"
He looked down and grinned. "Nitric acid," he said. "I was showing Willie something."
"But--our guests!"
He looked at her and he looked at the room, packed with the dregs from all the rooms. "Mother, I'm not sure--and don't look now--but I strongly believe that these people--don't exist!"
Mrs. Bailey repeated the phrase to her husband while she was dressing for dinner.
"'Don't exist'! What does he mean by that? He must have gone mad!"
"He certainly is acting like a conceited, self-important ass!"
Jimmie, in a rather worn dinner jacket, leaned through the door of his mother's boudoir. "If I throw a handful of salt in a pitcher of fresh water," he said, causing both his parents to turn with a start, "the water at the bottom of the pitcher may go on thinking it's fresh for several seconds. But it won't be. The water at the bottom will also become salty very soon. That's what I mean by saying that those guests of yours--don't exist." He waved his hand at them.
His mother said, "Good heavens!"
CHAPTER II
UNSEASONABLE weather has a stimulating effect on people. The cold spell, which had frozen the river and covered the rolling lands with snow, also caused the Bailey guests to arrive at the country club with extra zest. Their eyes sparkled; they lustily beat casual flakes from their furs and coats; they talked in loud voices. With a sense of distant indignation, Jimmie went through the ritual of arrival, of introductions, of a drink at the bar, and of sitting down at the table in a private dining room with his family and some twenty of their friends. He remembered a few of them. In time, his mother had said.
There were flowers and paper decorations. There was a girl for Jimmie. A Miss Somebody-or-other--a blonde edition of his sister, older but as streamlined--in a lamé dress. The glittering garment and the gleaming of her hair made him think, not of a person, but of a weapon in a sheath. No denying that she was beautiful. He looked at her closely as she turned toward him and his brain swam for a moment.
Waiters at the half-trot brought oysters on shimmering ice and poured wine.
Music came from nowhere that he could see. A woman said, "Jimmie, tell us about London."
The heads came around like heads at a tennis match. Jimmie picked up his glass in fingers that threatened to snap its stem. "War going on," he said rudely.
His mother glared and made herself smile. "Jimmie had us all promise not to ask any questions tonight."
A man said candidly, "The devil he did! What does he think we came here for except to get the low-down on the British game? Prodigal home--fatted calf killed--and no memoirs! A sellout, I say!"
"I'm a poor prodigal," Jimmie answered, "and due only a lean calf. You see, this is my first night home and I'm pretty happy to be here and, well, you people and this dinner and the whole town seem kind of fabulous. You're the real prodigals! I'm so darned busy trying to get used to all this that I can't think back to--that."
The Miss Somebody at his side said, in a voice lowered so no one could hear,
"Not very sporting of you, Jimmie! Life in Muskogewan's on the dull side. You're the most exciting thing that's happened this fall! At least, I strongly suspect you could be."
She looked at him with eyes like an electric shock.
"What should I have said?" He stared at her, unbelieving.
"Oh, anything. Tell 'em about being on the street in a fire. How it sounds when the guns are going. Anything with jive."
His hands trembled slightly. "There was a child--one morning--four or five years old--blown up on a lamppost. Alive and conscious. Hanging--by its insides."
The girl's eyes became murky. She made her mouth firm. Her color ebbed and surged back. When, presently, she spoke, her voice was level again. "You go in for melodrama, Mr. Bailey."
"Tossing bombs into people's yards is 'melodramatic.' The very point I wanted to avoid."
She said, "Oh."
They were all talking about the war, then. All but Jimmie. He supposed, at first, that they were trying to draw him out. For a while he didn't listen. He ate slowly, enjoying the food, glancing sometimes at the lame girl, aware that she was pondering him when she thought she wouldn't be detected. By and by he realized that they talked all the time about the war--as they were talking then. He began to listen.
"Napoleon," his father was saying, "tried the same thing, on the same people, the same way, and for the same reasons. And Hitler will have to write off just as much as Napoleon did, in the end. History, I keep telling some of my inflammable neighbors, repeats itself. Russia--winter--and Waterloo."
"Exactly." A man who wore a pince-nez beamed sagaciously above his shirt front.
"The parallel is precise. Any first-rate dictator can conquer Europe. Europe needed a conquering. Needed central organization. Of course, Nazi methods will necessarily have to be followed up by sound business methods. No popinjay can run a big business like unified Europe. Not that I favor Hitler, but I never did like all those little separate nations and I do favor central authority."
"Except," a thin, dark woman said, "when it's central in Washington."
Everybody laughed. The man with the pince-nez laughed too. "Napoleon had, essentially, the same ideas as Hitler. Actually, I'm against Hitler." He beamed at Jimmie for praise. Jimmie was unresponsive. "Yes, one hundred per cent against. Don't like his looks, or his voice. Cheap dunce. I'd have been against Napoleon, too, I suppose. Pushing pigmy. All wars are purely economic, and I think we can safely leave this one to General Winter and General Scorch-the-Earth. If we could only plant that idea in Washington!"
He chuckled. "Emergency!" His voice was scornful. "Do you see any emergency here, Jimmie?"
Jimmie thought that he was going to leave the table. He found himself sitting still, however, and thinking. Finally he drew an uneven breath. "I--I've heard people, in England, talking about the parallel between Napoleon and Hitler. We all know a lot about Hitler. Not enough, but a lot. But is anybody here able to tick off Napoleon's plans for Europe? I mean, the way we can tick off Hitler's?"
Nobody said anything.
Jimmie looked at the tablecloth, nodding. "Can anybody here say, off-hand, how much time passed between the retreat from Moscow and Waterloo?"
There was silence.
"Was Napoleon exiled by the English the first time, or the second--and who beat him both times? And where?"
Jimmie's father said, "What's the idea of this 'Information, Please'?"
The lean young man went on: "Who was Talleyrand? Certainly, someone--"
The dark woman at the other end of the table said, "Well, a premier. The premier of . . ." Her voice trailed off.
Jimmie grinned slightly. "I just meant to make it clear that you do a lot of learned talking. But you don't have any idea what you're talking about! My whole point."
"Don't be rude," his mother said sharply. "We know perfectly well what we're talking about!"
He looked from face to face. "You don't know the peace aims of Napoleon, or where he fought, or when, or against whom, or for what. Except in the haziest way. But you conclude N
apoleon was like Hitler. Napoleon took a horse and foot army into Russia more than a hundred years ago. Hitler went in last June, with tanks and planes. But you conclude the result is going to be the same! I just want you to realize--at least for a moment, if that's all you can--that nothing you are saying tonight means anything real at all. It's just--so much rubbish."
There was another silence. They looked angrily at Jimmie. Mr. Bailey finally laughed. "Well, Jimmie, you may be able to show us up on a few details of history. But you don't need to talk like the London propaganda office! We're wise to propaganda, over here."
People said, "We certainly are," and, "I suppose he's another, trying to drag us into Europe's quarrels." Things like that.
When a chance came, Jimmie hotly replied, "Napoleon was hardly a 'detail' of history, even if you don't know about him! Hitler is no detail, either." But he soon gave up.
The waiters were serving individual filets mignons. The room seemed even more giddily unreal. Full of shiny, hateful people, champing on their food and making a cackling unison of vocal nothing. They were even talking about Napoleon again, when he had made it dear that they had no intellectual right to discuss Napoleon until they read enough to understand what they were talking about. But they wouldn't read. They'd just go on talking.
"Don't you know," said the girl at his side, "that it's very poor form to show people their ignorance?"
"It's the kind of ignorance," he said, "that can rook them."
"Do you think it will?"
"If they don't think. It might."
"Just what, then, is the German staff plan for conquering Muskogewan?"
"Shall I tell you some more about the bombs?"
"Airplanes," she answered, "can't cross the Atlantic and return."
"That was last year."
"And even if they can, Muskogewan is more than a thousand miles from any coast."
"Shall we talk about something on which our information is relatively equal?"
"Our prejudices--you mean?"
He looked at her. "I said--information."
The girl blushed.
Waiters rolled back a series of frosted-glass doors. The private dining room was thus included in the main salon of the club. More people--perhaps two hundred--were sitting at tables, over the middles and the ends of dinners, and over highballs, and planter's punches, and even cocktails. The lights went down. A conical spot found the center of the dance floor and a master of ceremonies skidded into it, dragging a microphone. He began to make jokes.
Jimmie rose from the table, without apology, and walked through the smoke-tangled murk. There were men in the billiard room--talking about the war. From somewhere underneath the building he heard the roll and crash of bowling. He found an alcove off the foyer. It contained a few chairs and tables--and no people. He sat down and shut his eyes.
"You were pretty grim, you know," a husky voice said.
He looked up. She was standing in front of him, deliberately close to him; her golden dress had been poured over her molten and dripped heavily from her hips and her arms. "I--I--oh, well. Sit down." She sat down. Jimmie thought for a while. "Look. You can explain it, maybe, Miss--Whatever your name is."
"Audrey."
"Audrey. I thought, in England, that America had raised billions, and turned over its factories, and become the arsenal of democracy, and I thought there were a few dissenters. Lindbergh. Wheeler. I understood that we went into the last war as if it was fun. I knew people weren't--ecstatic--about things now. But everybody goes at me as if I had a thriller to tell. South African big-game story. And whenever I seem to show that I'm about to speak out for England people start throwing words as if they were dishes, before they hear me."
"You'll get over it," Audrey said. "You've obviously been too close to things. Lost your perspective. I could see that you despised them. After a while, though, you'll like them. You'll begin to understand our attitude. You'll get your courage back."
He sat up stiffly. "Get my courage back?"
"Certainly. Oh, I suppose you have plenty of the bravura kind left--for going outdoors in raids--all that. But I mean the courage to face the fact that the world is just going to change--and the sooner we Americans get used to the idea, the better." She lifted one shoulder prettily. "I can read you, Jimmie. Put it this way. You'll find out enough from these really sound people to be able to give up your loyalties to the old Europe. The rotten old Europe."
"Will!?"
"Let's not talk politics," she said.
"No. By all means. I might start killing people."
Audrey said, "You know, you're pretty fascinating--in spite of your British bias."
"Thanks."
She surveyed him teasingly. "Tall, dark, and handsome. A glint of red in the retreating hair. Old enough to--well, old enough. I don't mind telling you that when you walked into the bar, my not-too-maidenly heart skipped several beats."
"I'm glad to know it's beating, anyway."
She pretended to be amused. "Are you in love?"
"No."
"You don't mind if a girl tries--?"
"I have a rule about that. It depends on the girl."
"Me, then. I have your mother's permission."
"You'll find my mother is uniformly generous--with things that don't belong to her."
Audrey paused. "Have you ever been in love? You don't sound as if you had. You sound like the strictly cold-science type. But you look--well, amenable."
"I've been in love," Jimmie replied steadily.
Audrey laughed with a rich laughter. "That's something, anyway. Tell me about it!"
"Rather not."
"Please!" She wrinkled her nose. "Pretty please!"
Jimmie sank in his chair till his chin was on his chest. He looked savagely into the girl's eyes. "She was English. Her name was Ellen. In some ways--ever so many--she reminds me of you. Rather, you remind me of her. It was a shock when I saw you. She was bright blonde, like you, and tall and slender and she had one of those stagey voices that can make a man shake all over with a single syllable. About your age. Twenty-three?
I thought so. I was very fond of Ellen, though I never did see enough of her. Yes. I'd say I was in love. We weren't engaged--"
"Sissy! "
"It didn't seem worth being engaged until--this mess was over."
"Oh." Audrey pouted resentfully. Then she said, "And so--what happened to this great romance? Did some other more dashing faster-working lad barge onto the scene and steal her away?"
"Yeah," Jimmie answered. "A German pilot."
It was a brutal thing to do to anybody. Jimmie had thought it over for a fraction of a second before answering. And he had decided to say it as he had said it. Audrey deserved it for being so facetious about anything so private and unknown. His mood demanded it. He was brimful of disappointment. He loved his family. In all the years of his absence he had carried an awareness of them in his mind with a secret relish that had made every hour of his life pleasanter. His favorite fantasy--at Oxford and afterward--had to do with coming home and settling down near Muskogewan. But, now that he had come home, he found his family suspicious of him, estranged, bitter at his attitude, hectically opposed to everything for which he stood. In that mood he had struck back at the dreadful opening inadvertently made by the gleaming girl. He had not reckoned the consequence.
Audrey sat perfectly still. She had a pink-tan complexion, unusual in. a girl so blonde. The pink faded to pallor and the memory of a summer tan turned yellowish. Two tears formed in her eyes, filled them up, overflowed, and ran down her cheeks. Her shoulders contracted with the beginning of a sob, and contracted further, in an effort to stem the convulsion. She didn't say anything. She didn't even try to touch the tears on her cheeks.
Jimmie rose nervously and walked three steps away and three steps back. He stared out at people pushing and babbling in the foyer and he looked at Audrey again.
"Sorry."
She whispered, "I asked for it! P
ractically begged!"
"That doesn't exuse me."
"I think--I'll leave. If you'll go to the checkroom and get my wrap." Her fingers fumbled shakily with a small gold evening bag.
He took the bag, opened it, and extracted a brass check. He flipped it, caught it, and looked at her. She was repairing the damage done by the tears. "I wish you wouldn't go," he said.
Audrey smiled unsteadily. "Only thing to do, I think."
"No. No, it isn't, Audrey. I hurt your feelings fearfully--and I'd like to make amends. You hurt mine--and you want to hide. I know how that is. But I'll give you a challenge. If you, also, want to make amends you'll stay here. We'll sit in this little room and bicker for a while. Then I'll take you back to those clowns, the guests of my family.
You and I will dance and have fun and that will help me infinitely to avoid the many mokes."
She was still half smiling, but she shook her head. "It's no good. We disagree so terribly about everything. And you must despise me--besides."
"I couldn't despise you, whatever you thought," he answered. "Two reasons. You look so much like Ellen, for one. And the other is the way you cried when I--struck you--
just now. It was as mean as a blow, anyway--"
"It wouldn't do any good, honestly."
"On the contrary. Lemme see." He grinned charmingly. "I'll appeal to you in an abstract way. You're probably up to your ears in various kinds of social work. Bundles for Britain and whatnot?"
She nodded. "It's so silly, so trivial--"
"Well, here I am, a civilian veteran. Home on a sort of pseudo furlough. In the case of veterans they usually turn out the town's prettiest girls as dancing partners, companions, whatnot. Suppose we say that I requisition you? We'll be--by all odds--the handsomest couple on the floor. You'd raise the index so much--"
Audrey was recovering. "You're pretty sporting, Jimmie. You have nerve. I think I was mistaken about you. All right. You requisition me. I'll do a little bundling for Britain--"
He chuckled and broke off, looking at her in a startled way. Then he chuckled again. "Jolly old reconciliation, ho! What? As I never heard an Englishman say!"
