Philip Wylie - The Other Horseman

A manservant opened the door—a white man—and Jimmie remembered that his mother had been afraid of male servants, once. He cocked an internal eyebrow. The Baileys had gone a bit swank since his departure. Not very; just some. They could doubtless afford it. His father was an officer in one of the two biggest banks; Biff and Sarah had finished school. Nothing more logical than to spend a little on improving the manor house. It was still comparatively modest.

The furniture in the living room was modern. There was an electrical piano and a superautomatic phonograph-radio, but the fireplace was the same and so were the oak logs burning in it—another beloved recollection. His father offered him a cigar and he took it. Coats were handed to the servant. They sat down, Sarah and his mother and Biff with cigarettes. Jimmie drew on the cigar and looked at it and looked at them and smiled sleepily. That was, usually, his way of smiling—the long smile of a man with good nerves and a warm heart.

His mother said, “I’ve been rattling on, Jimmie! You haven’t had a chance! And we’re all dying to hear! So tell us everything about it!”

He had a sinking feeling; he thought he knew what she meant. “About what, Mother?”

“About what? The war, of course!”

He tried to go on smiling. “I’ve been on a slow boat from Lisbon for a whole lot of days. I was in New York for less than two hours. And last night and this morning on a train. You tell me.”

His father laughed. When he laughed, Jimmie could see he had aged considerably.

“Hannah doesn’t mean the situation today. Everybody knows that. She wants the personal experience angle, Jimmie. Especially the bombings. Your letters weren’t very frequent or very satisfying. Censorship, no doubt. But Hannah has a passion for bombing stories. Reads everything she can lay her hands on.”

“I think,” said his mother, “the British are positively thrilling. We’re all ears, Jimmie!”

He shrugged and shook his head, as if to himself. “I was working in a laboratory on the fringe of London. I was very busy. A bomb fell, once, within maybe six blocks of our place. It made quite a mess of a cow pasture.” He was lying.

“Don’t be a hold-out! You wrote you were in London summer before last—in the very worst of the blitz!”

“—and I stayed as far underground as I could!”

Biff leaned forward. “You must have seen places, though, soon after they’d been hit?”

Jimmie stuck his jaw out. “Yes.”

“He’s just trying to be dramatic,” Sarah said. “Building up suspense.”

The man just come from England looked at his sister. She had direct, diamond-shaped eyes, with dark fringes, like her mother’s. Dark hair that fell to the nape of her neck in a triumph of sumptuous grooming. She was wearing a blue dress. She was alive with interest and the presumption of understanding. “I’m not trying to build up any suspense, Sarah,” he answered slowly. “The bombs do that, without assistance. I’m just trying to say—without having to, but I guess I do—that I don’t want to talk about bombings. Really, I don’t. Nothing to say you haven’t read a hundred times, for one thing.

And not in the mood, for another. I’m glad to be back, hideously glad.” He looked at his wrist watch. “And if somebody’ll drive me—since I’m not positive I could get one of these new cars started, even—I’ll run over to see Corinth.”

His mother gasped. “But you can’t, dear! You simply can’t! It’s four, now—”

“I know. And old man Corinth may go home by five—”

She paid no attention. “—and at half-past the people will begin to stream in. Simply stream! They’re dying to see you!”

“People? What people?”

“Why, the people I invited for cocktails! I must have asked a hundred. Dinner isn’t till nine—on account of it. And we’ll have to change, because we’re going to the club for it. An intime little crowd. I promised you’d be here at four-thirty!”

Jimmie smiled again, differently. “Sorry I won’t then. I’ll duck back as fast as I can after I talk to Corinth, though. Ought not to take forever.”

Mrs. Bailey’s diamond-shaped eyes narrowed. A faint flush showed in her cheeks.

“Why, dear, it’s quite impossible for you to go over to the factory today. I’m sure Mr. Corinth doesn’t expect you, because Susie Corinth is coming here for cocktails and I told her to bring him.”

Jimmie raised his eyebrows. “Is he coming?”

“Later,” she said. “He’ll be kept at his office—”

“Then I’ll go over.”

“James!” There was a strident note in her voice. She started, twice, to speak imperatively, to demand that he stay. But she could not find the right words—or, if she found them, could not utter them—because he kept looking at her, waiting for anything she might have to say.

His father interrupted this silence. “It is pretty darned, well, selfish of you, son.

We’ve planned the whole weekend for you. Thought, even, you might not feel like starting at the paint works for a month or so. You wrote you’ve been going at it hard.”

Jimmie glanced from face to face, hunting for something he did not find. Then he walked toward the hall, passing close to his sister.

“Cad,” she said softly.

Biff rallied. “I’ll run you over—since you’re going.”

They were riding through the crystalline landscape again. “You’re kind of rough on them,” Biff said. “They’ve built up this homecoming into a fiesta. After all, you’re a legend around here. I suppose they expected something between an adoring undergraduate and a polished English earl.”

“But I wrote ’em why I was coming home!”

“Sure. To work for old man Corinth at the paint company. They were pleased as punch you got a job right here in town.”

“I mean, the Corinth plant can do certain things and I knew it, and the British agreed to lend me to the U. S. because I’m sort of a specialist on some lines—”

“Oh, that!” Biff grinned. “Mother and Father don’t know the difference between chemistry and astronomy.”

“Still, they know there’s a war going on—”

“Yeah,” said Biff. “And do they resent it! All except the dramatic part. Mom goes for that in a big way. She is to battles what an affecionado is to bulls.”

Jimmie winced.

The Corinth Paint and Dye Works loomed on the penumbral fringe of the town—a haphazard agglomeration of low buildings. Behind the buildings, chimneys poured smoke across the gray sky—black smoke and bright yellow smoke. There was a high fence around the plant and around the fence two uniformed guards, portly and important, paced back and forth, carrying revolvers on their fat stomachs. Biff and Jimmie were stopped at a gatehouse and allowed to pass after stating their errand. The office which received them was time-battered—a big place, full of ticking typewriters and people hurrying in and out with sheafs of papers. Biff said he’d wait there, but Jimmie insisted he’d take a cab home; so Biff went away, a little angered by his brother’s concentration on his errand and its importance.

Jimmie followed Mr. Corinth’s secretary between the rows of clattering desks into a small, dusty room. A man with vague gray eyes and a white mustache sat there, behind the ruins of a mahogany desk. He wore a suit of clothes a tramp would not have taken as a present. He frowned fustily at Jimmie and muttered, “Your name is somehow familiar, so I asked you in, but I’m in a hurry, young man, and I—” Suddenly he threw back his head and opened his mouth. He looked as if he were roaring with laughter, but he did not utter a sound. “Jimmie!” he exclaimed in a moment. “Lord! Am I glad you’re here! Been expecting you for weeks!”