“I doubt it. It might. You’re just back from London, I hear.”
“Yesterday.”
“Can they stand another blitz—all winter—if they get it?”
“I hope so.”
“I don’t give a damn what you hope. What do you think?”
“I hope so. Y ou ought to know something about people’s ability to take it where they live.”
Heiffler chuckled. “You’re a pretty sound egg, Bailey—considering your brother!”
“He could have been sound.”
“Mmm. Environment—”
“That colored man—have a family?”
“Five kids. A wife. She came here looking for him, about eight. The police don’t hurry to notify those people.”
“I’d like her name and address.”
The intern wrote it down, after searching in a file. “How much steam has Hitler got left?”
Jimmie shrugged. “Does it matter?”
There was a pause. “I see what you mean.”
“Still, it would be worth a lot to American character, I think, if every city and town in the country was bombed once. Just once. Be a big rebirth of fundamental qualities. Cheap—at the price. As I heard a woman say last night, ‘We kill more people with cars than the British lost to bombs—and we don’t get upset!’ It’s a happy thought, Heiffler—especially on this occasion. Good night.”
CHAPTER VII
WEDNESDAY PASSED—and a Friday.
Jimmie knew he was going to count the weeks in that fashion. He would keep doing it, at least until he was sure beyond all doubt that Audrey was not going to the home of Dan, the music teacher, two nights in every seven, or until he was sure that she had stopped going there.
His family was preoccupied with Biff. Biff was better. He’d written two very amusing letters for the Daily Dispatch. One was about having your legs broken. The other was about pretty nurses.
Jimmie was relieved by his family’s absorption in his brother, because he was very busy with himself.
Two things had arrived at the Bailey home on the day after Biff’s accident.
Audrey’s diaries—by registered post—mailed, ingeniously, in a small carton that bore the name of the Corinth Works. That stratagem would cause his family to think, if they noticed the package, that it contained business matters. Mr. Corinth’s scrapbooks had also come—by truck. Into them, Jimmie had plunged. He had read every evening—from dinner to bedtime, and afterward. But he had hidden the diaries in his closet.
The big scrapbooks, thick with pastings, were like the other tangibles in the old man’s life: they showed imagination and resourcefulness, a keen ability to anticipate the future, a steady, critical awareness of present values. In the scrapbooks were editorials and articles and speeches, pronunciamentos by politicians and world leaders, maps and pictures, reviews of movies and reviews of plays, scraps of laymen’s opinions, predictions, interpretations, headlines—and personal letters, letters from people unknown to Jimmie and letters from people known to everybody in the nation.
As he read, hour by hour and night by night, the saga of the six years he had missed at home-edited and interpreted through the selections of the venerable chemist—Jimmie began to understand what had happened to America, to his own family, to Muskogewan, to everyplace and everybody. He began to guess, also, the tenor of the old man’s thoughts and hopes anent America’s future—after the war. That Mr. Corinth had such a catholic knowledge of world affairs was not remarkable.
Many other scientists had the same knowledge; and of them, many lived and worked not in the great cities, not in the gigantic factories, but in towns like Muskogewan and factories like the paint and dye works. It was, on first glimpse, somewhat remarkable that a man in a town in the center of a continent had such broad, important and intimate contacts. But, on reflection, Jimmie remembered that many Americans, in many villages, had stayed on their own doorsteps and made their mousetraps—and the world had built cement highways right up to their porches.
The realization that Mr. Corinth was a great man had come to Jimmie immediately, upon their first meeting as grown men—the meeting on the afternoon of Jimmie’s return. The realization that Mr. Corinth was a great American, and would always be known and remembered as such, came more slowly. Certainly Muskogewan had little inkling of the impressive qualities of its white-haired citizen. Muskogewan regarded him as an eccentric old duck who had a million dollars, made paint, and who knew a lot of important people, for some odd reason. Social Muskogewan felt that a good many of Mr. Corinth’s guests would have been happier with them at the country club than they were in the rather ugly Corinth home, eating the plain vittles cooked by black Rarietta, and sitting all afternoon in a drizzling rain with a .22 rifle, waiting for a groundhog to appear in a pasture—which the beast never did. A cabinet member had done that, once, with Mr. Corinth. There was even an editorial about it, snipped from the Muskogewan Dispatch, in the old man’s books. It said that, “our up-to-date and handsome city affords far better entertainment for personages of note than host Corinth seems to understand—or care about, for that matter.”
Jimmie learned from the bulky ledgers.
But in every moment of his reading, and during every hour of his day-long labors at the laboratory, the awareness of the other parcel of reading matter burned in the back of his mind. At night, as he lay in his bed, listening to the slick crackle of tires on the avenue and the pattering scratch of bare twigs on the walls, he envisioned Audrey’s diaries as if they had a penetrating radiance which he could see shining through his closet door. In the daytime, wherever he was, he was as conscious of them as if they had a musical tone that he alone could hear but that he could not escape.
He had every sort of thought about them. His principal idea was that to read such diaries was to eavesdrop. The fact that Audrey had voluntarily sent them to him made no difference. At least, for several days, he assured himself that it made no difference. It then occurred to him that there might be nothing in the package but blankbooks—that the maneuver was a practical joke. A psychological joke. To satisfy that suspicion, he unwrapped the bundle. A dozen leather-covered books were disclosed. He flipped the leaves. They were solid with neat, tall, ink-written words put down in a circular backhand. So it was the diaries, all right. He put them back.
He knew that, in a sense, the sending of the diaries did represent a psychological trick. Audrey expected that he would resist reading them. His training, his instincts, his nature, were calculated to make any such intimate process undesirable. She knew, also, that the temptation would obsess him. It would have that effect on anybody. The fact that Jimmie was intellectual and detached, moral in the deepest sense, and also chivalrous, would not diminish his emotional struggle about the matter.
By this strange, unconventional step she had said, Here, read this; this is my history and my confessional; when you have finished with it you can do as you please; but, at least, you will know as much about me and my inward self as I do. She had also, doubtless, filled the books with references to other people—references of a private nature.
That fact weighed heavily against prying into the gilt-edged books. On the other hand, Jimmie could imagine her saying, “Wouldn’t you rather know—than have to guess by interpreting gossip? There’s not a syllable in there about other people that isn’t the common coin of Muskogewan’s underground chatter; it is better to have the unvarnished facts than the heavily painted suspicions.”