Jimmie found himself resuming the smile he had worn on the train, coming home.
“Hello, Mr. Corinth. I’m glad to see you. I read in a journal something about what you’ve been doing here, and when Washington tapped my superiors for some chemists I said I’d go and I suggested going here. I didn’t want to leave much, though.”
Mr. Corinth’s eyes were less opaque. “Naturally.”
“I thought I ought to. London finally cabled the State Department. They talked to the moguls. I was in a plane for Lisbon a day later. What’s on the fire?”
The old man rubbed his face with both hands and looked through his fingers.
“You could be an agent, eh? Walking in cold. You could—Jimmie, if I didn’t remember the Hallowe’en you broke the windows in my chicken coop and I caught you redhanded! You still do look impish, in a conservative way.” He laughed silently again. “I was sure proud when you won the chemistry prize in Oxford! Almost tried to hire you then. Seems a long time ago, eh? And that paper you just wrote was a peach!” He paused and said quietly, “How are they doing, Jimmie?”
The young man answered, “All right.”
“No better than that?”
“Maybe, a little. It’s not easy—on just plain people.”
“Jimmie, who isn’t—just plain people?”
The homecoming smile became a shade rueful. “Well, I guess my folks aren’t—any more. We’ve put on the dog, Mr. Corinth. About Saint Bernard size, it looks like.”
“Willie,” the other man answered.
“Willie?”
“Call me Willie. My wife does. Half the chemists in America do. Anybody who can write about using isotopes the way you did can automatically call me Willie. You’re Jimmie—and I’m Willie. Mm. I can imagine your folks are—a shock.” He shrugged. “I’ll show you through the shop tomorrow. Meantime, what’s this I got in a letter practically dunked in sealing wax about you working on an incendiary that will stick to whatever it hits?”
Jimmie pulled his chair forward. They began to talk. Only a few thousand men in the whole of America would have understood everything that they said. The five-o’clock shift went home. The bright yellow smoke paled against the darkling sky. Lights came on—Willie Corinth impatiently jerked on his bluish one in the middle of something about a gas-driven torpedo motor that would stand being dropped from forty thousand feet onto the hard sea. At last Jimmie looked at his watch and flushed.
“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.