“I believe in doing everything I want to do.”
She looks directly into his eyes. “No. How can you, Judd? I mean, there are things people think of, impulses, not only sex-”
“If we imagine things, then those things exist in us. It’s only cowardly not to do what we want.”
Her voice becomes low, intimate, almost pleading. “I know, Judd. Ideas like that, Nietzsche and such ideas, they may seem very logical. We can even believe them with our minds. But we don’t have to do them.”
Is the fear coming up in her? he wonders. For that is what he would need to go through with it.
“But, Judd, suppose everyone believed like that,” she whispers. “Then everyone would be justified in doing anything. Even murder.” Her whisper is somehow schoolgirlish, and he has an impulse to laugh, yet to kiss her and tell her not to be scared.
He hears his own voice repeating his favourite ideas. There have to be people who are ready to explore all the possibilities of human experience.
“Oh,” she says, as though trying desperately to keep up with him, “oh, there have been plenty of people who have found out all about evil.”
But the higher the type of mind, Judd says, the more there is to be discovered.
And then she says it. Lightly. She hopes he doesn’t feel, because he has such a brilliant mind, that it is his duty to taste every crime like rape and murder.
“Oh, the murder now won’t be necessary,” Judd remarks, almost idly. And he catches himself. But she is too confused to notice meanings within meanings. Her brows are contracted, a shadow is over her face.
“I mean,” he says, “if I were to rape you now, I wouldn’t have to murder you because it would be unlikely that you would announce that you had been possessed. You would be more likely to keep it a secret and become my mistress.” She is breathing quickly. If she makes a move to get up and run away, he knows her movement will unleash him from the last restraint. His arm, his hand holding the heavy field glasses, will describe an arc…
But she does not move. Are tears coming into her eyes? There is such a questioning in them, such a dismay. And now the moment has come for him, for an act of will. Inwardly Judd feels tumultuously threatened; he doesn’t dare examine what doubts may be rising in him, but some horrible upheaval is there, as if all, all he were ever sure of were suddenly crossed out, wrong! And it is a partner-feeling, too, to the strange sense of almost – almost – Of almost being free, almost attaining. Yes, attaining! The same feeling that he experienced the other night, beside the cistern. To reach the sense of having done, done!
With an act of will, he rolls his body upon her. Ruth’s body is rigid. Her face is so utterly close to his that Judd can no longer see it, only the eyes, still puzzled and hurt.
“Please don’t,” she begs. “Judd, please don’t.”
He tries to insert his knee between her legs, and recalls some definition in a piece of sex literature that it is really impossible to rape a woman, that in the last moment, even against her conscious will, she physically consents.
With his free hand he tears at his clothing. She seems not so much to be resisting as to have become unliving, frozen. He feels his throbbing power. He will do this. He alone.
“Judd, Judd, I’m afraid for you!” Ruth calls, with awful anxiety, and he seems to hear the call over a distance of years in the voice of his mother as he tries to walk atop a fence. And all at once her arms are around him, holding him close, close, somehow protectively.
In that moment it isn’t predominantly a fear of what might happen to herself that pervades Ruth, but a dreadful anguish for the boy, for the sick, sick eyes, for the tyrannic needs in him – not only his sex lust but something far beyond, some horror. And her intuitive gesture is to draw the sick soul into herself, not the drawing in of sex that might come to a mature woman, but the girlish impulse, the drawing in to her heart.
And then, suddenly, he is spent.
Her head turns sideways, under him, and he rolls from her.
Now if death could come through a wish, he would will himself to cease existing. For it is not only the after-sorrow and the physical disgust of spilling; it is the whole sense of failure, incompetence to live, that invades him.
He lies motionless as she looks at him. He supposes, somehow, he will have to say he is sorry, and he tries to move his lips.
Ruth says, “Don’t. I understand. I want to understand.” And she makes a slight, tentative gesture, as to touch him, but withholds, knowing she must not touch him.
Presently the tension lessens. And then a thought begins to come up in Judd, like some distant memory. One way in which the experience has perhaps succeeded, or meant something. For through the entire attempt, even at the most urgent moment, the moment when it always came, there had not come the image of Artie.
Could he, then, only be like everyone else? Could it be possible that he may come really to be in love with a girl, perhaps this girl? Even marrying, raising a family? Would the whole idea of what that is all about, what ordinary life is all about, come to him, too?
But if he can be ordinary… He shudders in horror and fear, as of losing his very self, and at the same time he experiences a frightful sense of something wasted, the murder as a false and wasted act. If the newer self is the real one, he has in previous dark error forsworn it.
On the way back, they do not refer to the experience. They scarcely speak, and yet Judd does not find himself uncomfortable with her. When he leaves her at her house she asks, “Shall I see you again?”
“Do you want to?” Judd says.
“If you do.”
They make a date for Monday evening.
The crime had become our total obsession. I worked with Tom, running after the police and with the police and ahead of the police from one glimmer to another, and watching the other reporters, and eluding the other reporters, and conjecturing and imagining and listening, and gathering more and more the feeling in the city that some hitherto unknown terror was among us. The child’s fear of wolves prowling in the forest, wolves that will eat you up – this childhood fear seemed now to have leaped awake in every soul in Chicago, and the wolves were the primordial menace, more savage than any beast ever encountered by man. There was a growing presage that something new and terrible and uncontrollable, some new murder-germ, was here involved.
The threat seemed to be against the logic of life itself, for we must have sensed, beyond the touchable aspects of the mystery, that some killing factor, some element, purely murderous, had broken loose. Even before the boys were arrested, there was this dreadful foreknowledge of the escape of some always present, imperfectly contained violence, and if we did not capture it, if we did not hold it and examine it and master its containment, we were all unceasingly exposed, lost.
Tom and I were only a couple of reporters caught up in this hysteria. Yet we could see how, among the police chiefs, there was a growing bewilderment. Their statements daily became more contradictory. Every hour there would be a new crop of sensational clues; by nightfall everything would have been disproven; and on the next day the chiefs would again announce that the murderer would soon be caught.
On Saturday morning, Nolan still declared, in an interview in the Tribune: “There is no doubt in my mind that the man who wrote the suicide letter was the same man who wrote the kidnapping letter.” But by noon the poor suicide had been discounted, forgotten. And a number of other suspects – teachers, even relatives of teachers who owned Underwood portable typewriters – were suddenly being discharged. For though the first expert had stated that the ransom note had been typed on an Underwood, a new expert declared that the machine was a Corona.