Audrey began to cry.
Jimmie said, “God almighty!”
Bluish shadows had been moving up the brown hill, hiding the half-camouflaged Guernsey cows and evaporating the sharp relief of the white barn and the little outbuildings. The wind still fanned the cold river sweetly and it brought the voices of the invisible cattle. The girl wept quietly. Jimmie sat still. In that pastoral, his mental pictures were a shocking contrast. Under the bland luxury of Audrey’s home—luxury displayed for the world to envy—was the harsh substance of human inhumanity. All over the earth inhumanity crept, lunged, flew screaming, with its assorted cargoes of malice—of malice crystallized in laboratories like his own, killing malice, flesh-ripping malice, malice that hurt worse than death. Surely, man had somehow perverted the laws of nature in the search for his selfish ends; surely nature was exacting an appalling payment—in homes where nature was scorned, and in lands where nature was denied its freedom.
The little tragedy of being an Audrey seemed great, in the coupe by the river, in that hour of beatitude. The great tragedy of being English, or German, or Czech, seemed faraway and small by that same criterion. Perhaps, where the little one was rooted, the big ones bloomed in poisoned proliferation. Perhaps, when men as individuals absconded from responsibility and insisted upon advantage, men as groups paid back the debt in bloody struggles of nihilism enforced, and nihilism rejected by force. There was a Hitler in Audrey’s home—and in his own. But Hitler was, after all, just a symbol of the mad determination of mankind to have its willful way. Only that—and absolutely nothing more.
He did not even notice that Audrey had stopped crying. He turned when she said, “What are you thinking about?”
“Audrey?”
“Yes, Jimmie.”
“I don’t want to start this crazy business of seeing you.”
“Neither do I. In a way. I just must.”
“But I mustn’t.”
“I haven’t asked for a thing—except for you to see me.”
“That’s all. Just that I make myself responsible for whatever might happen to you.
If, as you planned, I get tired and discouraged and perplexed and cannot resist your blandishments—then I’ll owe a debt to that. And if your family finds out you are seeing me and really puts in effect any such fantastic business as you describe—I’ll owe for that.
You will have suffered on account of me and I will have been a party to it. I don’t belong to myself. I belong to a fight for a hope. So—I’ve nothing to offer you. Nothing.”
“What hope? You didn’t say anything about your hopes.”
“No. And I won’t. They’re vague, so far. I fight because I am too proud to surrender without fighting. Any hope I have can express itself after the fight is won—if it ever is.”
“Why not begin hoping now, specifically? That will be something to help you fight, won’t it?”
“Pride’s enough. It’s all we had left—and there wasn’t much of that. I don’t mean vanity. I mean, I was proud to be a free man, proud that my ancestors and I wouldn’t accept any Hiders. Hiders are the easy way out, the expedient way, the lazy solution. But they never do lead out.”
“If you were just a bunch of ideas I wouldn’t have driven you here. You’ve got feelings, besides.”
“Yeah. I’m thinking of that.”
Audrey took a lipstick from her handbag. She was not shaking any more. She redid her lips—or started to—and laughed. “I didn’t think I’d got in the habit of repairing my lips whenever I parked with a boy.” She frowned. “And I haven’t! I just hoped—that I’d have to, with you. That was my hope! I can see what you mean, Jimmie. I wouldn’t want you to owe me anything. I’m sure of that. Maybe you were right. Maybe I was crazy. You’ve got a lot of glamour.”
“Glamour’s a commodity, now. That spoilt it.”
“Didn’t it!”
“Besides, glamour requires backgrounds. There aren’t any good ones left—much.
Except in United States.”
Audrey backed the car expertly, and turned into t he road. It was dusk. “I certainly tried hard to blitzkrieg you, Jimmie!”
He smiled in the murk. “I was nearly licked.”
“I’ll drop you a block from your house. I don’t want your family to tell my family that it took me about three hours to break the new commandment.”
“No. Neither do I. And they would.”
The car hummed under arc lights at corners. The houses grew in size and the distance between them increased. Lights were on in all of them and they glowed with the very essence of warm good will. “So far,” he said, at one point, “the American blackout’s still inside the people.”
She didn’t answer. A block from his home, she stopped. He stepped out. “You may be right,” she said softly. “I may be. Anyhow, Jimmie, I’m going to start my music.
Wednesdays and Fridays. At nine.” Her coupe budged forward, gathered speed, and swept down the luminous street, its gears shifting automatically. Jimmie walked along the cement sidewalk. Presently, he looked up. The same stars, in the same patterns, shone across the new evening. The unchangeability of those patterns was like a great scorn.
He entered his house with a sense of heavy fatigue. There was an aura of disturbance in the living room. Cocktails left half tasted. Chairs out of place. Something wrong. “Hey, people!” he called, trying to make his voice amiable and positive.
Westcott came from the dining room. “They’re all at the hospital, Mr. Bailey.
Your brother’s been hurt. Smashed his car up.”
“The devil he has! Bad?”
“I couldn’t say. They don’t know yet.”
Jimmie sat down slowly.
The slacker, he thought. The coward!
CHAPTER VI
BIFF—HIS given name was Bedford—was darker than Jimmie. His hair was straight, a few shades from black, and he had large brownish eyes. The irises were not all brown but part greenish and part yellowish. His mother called them hazel. He was a huge, husky youngster with an overlarge head. He looked as if his basic design had been a pile of various-sized boxes. He was the archetype of a fullback—although he had played end for three years on the team of State University.
He lay on the table in the emergency room of the hospital, smoking a cigarette.
When Jimmie came in he was looking at the ceiling, blinking his eyes. The pupils of his eyes were contracted—he’d been given morphine—and his mouth had relaxed into an unaware, shadowy smile, as if he were immersed in a fantasy that had nothing to do with what was happening around him. Around him, in fact, there was no activity whatever. An intern stood against a glass cabinet with an expression of patient expectancy. Biff’s family was draped here and there in positions of anguish. Sarah and her mother, in the proper mien of horror, kept glancing down at the pool of blood on the tile floor. Mr.
Bailey was looking out the window at a wall, his shoulders high, with an admission of grief, and a proud proclamation of courage.
It was Biff’s smile, Jimmie knew, that corroborated his inner assurance. Jimmie didn’t like that smile—slick, catlike, pleased. They didn’t see Jimmie, at first. They didn’t see him because he wore soft-shod heels, and because they were not yet in the habit of expecting to see him, and because they had other things to hold their attention.
Biff’s eyes became conscious of something at their peripheral range, and the smile on Biff’s lips vanished even before he turned his head: Biff wiped it out. He substituted a small twist of pain. He said, weakly, “Hello, there, Jim.”
His older brother spoke quietly, too, but strongly. “Hello, Biff! How’d it happen?”