Philip Wylie - The Other Horseman

“How long have you been reading?”

“All morning.”

Jimmie sat down in a chair beside his bed. He looked out of his window at the street. The truck driver was lolling in his seat with his feet propped on the windshield.

Jimmie kept his voice calm. “I assume that you have concluded Audrey is rather a—well—”

Sarah smiled. “She is—rather!”

“I see.”

“On the other hand—” Sarah sat up, after folding over the corner of a page in the diary—“well, a psychiatrist would be interested in her. She’s ruthless. She’s unconventional—to put it meagerly. She does as she pleases. She isn’t mean, exactly, although she’s hurt a lot of people in a big way. She seems to be sort of trying to find out something. That is, she seemed to be when she was eighteen and up through now—when she’s twenty. She doesn’t mind how hard she has to try, or what trying involves, or even being hurt, herself. She’s got nerve. Boy! What a nerve!”

“The search for happiness,” Jimmie said remotely.

“Happiness? I wouldn’t interpret it that way. I don’t think she gives a damn about being happy. Not in the cake and candy and comfort sense. She wants to be what she calls, ‘in the groove,’ doesn’t she? The times when she said she was weren’t necessarily comfortable times for her, were they? Don’t tell me you haven’t read these things!”

“No. I haven’t read them.”

“But they must have been here last night—”

“They’ve been here for a week or more.”

“And you haven’t read them!” Sarah laughed and stopped herself. “That’s a new high in something! What’d you do—steal ’em?”

“She sent them to me.”

“Sent—” The girl’s voice broke. “Sent them to you!”

“Unh.”

“She sent them to you? She must be crazier than writing all this even would indicate.”

Jimmie sighed lightly. “I dunno. Naturally.”

“But why? Why? Some kind of advertisement? Some way of showing you that—but any man with half a pair of eyes could see that gilded fireball was—! I don’t get it!”

“I’m sorry you found those books.”

“I’m not. Not by a long way! I’ll remember this morning as about tops in my eighteen years!” Sarah’s eyes narrowed. “Jimmie, tell me. You aren’t one of those—well—I was a kid when you left here. I worshiped you, and you never noticed—and all that. But I never knew anything about you, really. You aren’t one of those fabulous, innocent people, are you?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Innocent?”

“Oh, don’t sit there being English with me! You make me awfully impatient about less important things than this! You might as well tell me a little truth, for once. After all—” Sarah’s expression was cunning—“I’ve got the goods on you, haven’t I?”

Jimmie did not stir. He felt his heart lunge. But his blood came out of his iron viscera again. He knew anger—the insatiable, endless kind of anger, righteous and implacable, the kind of anger that is the shield of the world. “I don’t get that, sis.”

“Don’t get it?” The girl was deeply apprehensive again. His color had changed and his face was different. His voice was the same. She had thought for a little while that she had found the key to Jimmie, that he was not just a silent and determined person but, underneath, a weak and uncertain one. She was suddenly less sure about that. Her own fear—her conscience and her anxiety—moved her to a jittery assertiveness. “Of course you do! If Audrey sent you this—this—case history, it means she’s been simply utterly stunned by you in some perverse way. That means, she’s in a position that’s simply too utterly vulnerable! And so are you, because you’re much too genteel to let her suffer from the fact that you left her intimate papers lying around!”

“How do you mean—suffer?”

“Don’t try to intimidate me with that chill! You know how! If I started to let out just even a few little paragraphs of what’s in these books—! Boy! The blast would go across Muskogewan like a hurricane! Houses would fall in. Families would scatter.

Strong men would take cover. Mothers and daughters would go barging around with their fingernails filed into hooks!”

“But, Sarah, you don’t propose to do that.”

“It all depends. All I said was, I had the goods on you. Now—and for all time! You understand that. I don’t know what I want. Not anything, especially, now. You might be nicer to a few of my friends. I don’t care about mothers and fathers, but the way you cut some of my crowd the one time you went to the club—well, it was humiliating to me.”

“Just an amiable little social blackmail, Sarah? Is that all?”

“No, it’s not all! ‘All’—is whatever I want. Whatever. And whenever. Since I have got the whiphand over you by a miracle—and it’s just plain justice, for once in my life—I might as well do a job of straightening you out! For one thing, it’s time you stopped telling Father what for. He’s a banker, and a business man, with a lot of knowledge a chemist simply couldn’t have. He’s widely read and he has powerful friends. You’ve just been sitting in some dingy English lab watching a bunch of clucks suffer under bombing—so you take a sentimental viewpoint about the whole world! I must say, it gets my goat!”

Jimmie’s lips twitched faintly. “That, too. You’re going to take away my freedom of speech.”

“I’ll do better. I’ll make you retract what you said.” Sarah walked over and half sat on the windowsill. She leaned toward her brother; her expression was a mixture of unholy rapture and plain savagery. “I think, for instance, that it would be terribly nice if you joined the America Forever Committee. I’d like to see you make a few speeches, even, against helping win this war. You surely must have seen some things, if you look back honestly, that make you realize that some people in England don’t like America and would enjoy seeing America crushed.”

“Oh, several. Several.”

“I take it, then, you’ll join?” Even Sarah’s voice showed a sort of incredulity over the apparently absolute collapse of her brother’s morale. “Mother will be so happy! I’ll be so—amused. I did look forward to your return, Jimmie—with a terrible longing. A pretty nearly crazy expectancy. When it turned out that you were just a—a snot, I couldn’t bear it. That’s what makes revenge so sweet.”

Jimmie had stood more than enough.

He had led his sister on by a quietness that had suggested subjugation. He had wanted to see how far and how deep her malice would go. Now that he knew, his rage was explicit. He had to stop Sarah, at any cost. Any. That was the one fact upon which he must act.

Audrey had put her whole life in his hands—against his will and without his knowledge—but he had accepted the trust by the mere retention of the diaries. He could have sent them back. He had not sent them back.

Sarah had read them—or some of them. Black-haired, blue, blistering-eyed Sarah.

And Sarah was going to use her stolen information as a bludgeon, a dagger, an eternal wellspring of power and black laughter. That was her scheme. To be so willing, so eager to torture, she must have been tortured herself, first. Jimmie did not know by whom or by what—and there was no time to find out. Sarah was dangerous as she sat there—crouched, almost—in front of him. The danger had to be met.

“I couldn’t persuade you,” Jimmie said, after a moment, and not looking at his sister, “that what you intend to do is pretty scurvy? It’s blackmail, you know. Besides, how can I tell that you won’t do what other blackmailers have done? How can I tell that you won’t, someday, just hint to Audrey, say—or Audrey’s mother—that you know all about these diaries? How can I be sure that you won’t go on clubbing people to gain small advantages for yourself?”