Jimmie thought. “You mean, you believed I ought to stay here, and you nevertheless decided that because I was going there you would?”
“We Wilsons,” Audrey answered, “are a rapacious lot. And also, we never quit! Besides, this is my first experience with being right, and knowing it. I don’t intend to let go of it. Sure, I thought you ought to stay. But I think something else, a lot harder. You’ve heard the theme. ‘Whither thou goest—’ Something of that sort.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!”
“In which case, I will too.” Audrey began to cry.
Jimmie looked over his shoulder, ignoring her tears.
He stared at Willie Corinth’s plant, in the process of reconstruction. A huddle of buildings, melting to nothing behind the shifting curtain of snow. Buildings to house the dreams of men—dreams that could be destructive, and dreams that could be beautiful and creative. Opposites. A quiet hung over the scene, a lunch hour tranquility; at one o’clock the clamor would begin again, the energetic progress of rebuilding on the tomb of the unrecovered ashes of Willie Corinth.
Thinly, far away, a boy’s voice hawked the first edition of the day’s Dispatch.
Something about England. The sharp-angled, stagey scene blurred before Jimmie’s eyes.
This, too, was something about England. Something about all human living. His mind screwed down like a vise until it squeezed out every thought of himself and every feeling about Audrey—until it rigidly gripped one element alone: the symbol he’d named for his father! Man’s freedom, man’s soul, man’s future, man’s hope.
He looked back very slowly. Their eyes met. Across the cold air between them—air misty with his breath—they exchanged surrender and possession.
“All right, Audrey. We’ll stay.”
Copyright
FARRAR & RINEHART, INC.
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COPYRIGHT, 1942, BY PHILIP WYLIE
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