Philip Wylie - The Other Horseman

Biff picked up the volume and showed the dust jacket. It was Shirer’s Berlin Diary. “ Hell of a thing,” he said. “Who do those Nazis think they are anyhow! You suppose this bird Shirer tells the truth?”

“Happen to know he does.”

“How do you know?”

Jimmie was more moved, more astonished and upset, than he wanted Biff to see.

He edged toward the door. “Oh, I know, Biff, because—well, when I step out of the house on a night like this—now, and next year, and for years to come—I get a sinking sensation in my guts. For a minute I won’t know why. It’ll just be there—cold and hard. I’ll look up and down the street to see what’s wrong, Biff, and then I’ll know. The moonlight.”

“Moonlight?”

“Yeah. My guts will be saying, ‘See it? See the moon! Bright! Good visibility! They’ll be over soon, now.’ The sirens’ll start. The motors will begin to throb like your own pulse. And then—” He whistled. “Wham! Whoom! All around! Stuff like that. That’s why I know Shirer’s not lying. ’Night, keed.”

The music teacher lived near the river. Jimmie walked slowly, humming to himself. He still had time to kill. Once he turned and started back to the hospital. He decided his errand would keep till morning. His feet clicked on the cold pavement. His shadow rippled lithely on lawns and hedges. The eight-thirty ship out of Muskogewan left the airport with far-off thunder and passed overhead at a few hundred feet, portlights bright, wings tipped in red and green, exhausts pale lavender. Jimmie stood stark still to look at it, with goose pimples washing up and down his back. He went on, humming songs that came over the radio which Sarah and his parents seemed to play incessantly. They were all sad songs—about refugees, and the last time somebody saw Paris, and what somebody’s sister would disremember.

Depressing songs. Popular songs. A nice, incisive index, Jimmie thought, of the defeatist ebb of spirit in a country that thought of itself as the Colossus of the West. Sick Colossus!

The river flashed inkily through the naked trees. Cars streamed over the Maple Street bridge, starting and stopping-a dancing river of taillights, a pale avalanche of dimmers. Dan and Adele lived in a white clapboard house with a white picket fence and wrist-thick vines winding up over the roof of the porch. The curtains were drawn in the front rooms—yellow blinds down across lace. Jimmie poked the bell. Somebody was playing the piano with a rippling dissonance, and so many handfuls of notes they seemed to be showering from the keys at a humanly impossible rate. The music stopped and the door opened.

“Hello, Jimmie.”

“Hello, Audrey.”

“Come in.”

He came in. There was no change in the huskiness of her voice—or its mood. He had expected that they would pick up the threads of their first, and only, afternoon together, through studied speeches, conventions, an exaggerated ritual of re-meeting. But that was not going to be so. It was as if he had interrupted a song by lifting the arm of a phonograph, and left it there for a long while, and then set it back at the same place in order to hear the rest of it. Audrey walked into the living room ahead of him and turned around. She stood quietly. Lamplight fell on her. She wore a gray silk dress that went round her in three climbing spirals and had turquoise trimming.

“I had to wait quite a long while,” she said.

“Yes.”

He stood there, holding his hat. She walked up close to him: and put her arms around his neck, kissed him slowly, took his hat, and put it on the piano. “I love you very much,” she said.

Jimmie sat down. It was a pretty room. There was a fire going—a quiet fire. He leaned toward it.

“Audrey, I don’t love you.”

“I know. It’s dreadful, isn’t it?”

He nodded absently, lighted a cigarette, sighed a little. “Golly. I’m tired tonight.”

She laughed.

He looked up. She was sitting on the piano stool. “I told you, dope, that you’d be tired, and world-beaten—what is it? full of weltschmerz—and one of us Muskogewan girls would catch you!”

“It’s not that.” He grinned. “Audrey, you’re a devil.”

“Yes, I am. Willie says you wouldn’t read my diaries.”

“But that he told you about them.”

“He’s my boss. He can talk to me about what he pleases. He likes to talk.”

“And you like to listen to him. So do I. I love to! It’s a good thing for a girl—to know one very wise man in this world.”

“Where are your pals? Dan and Adele?”

“At the movies.”

“Oh.”

“Willie said you’d probably come over tonight. He said you had the look. He said you’d been jumpy—every Wednesday and Friday. It isn’t very gallant flattery, Jimmie. But it did help.”

“Yeah. I came over. You know, if you were just some-well—”

“—some dazzling daughter of Muskogewan, with nice clothes and a kissable mouth? Yes. Jimmie, you have no idea how many times I’ve wished I were—and tried to be! But I’m not, and there it is.”

“There it is.”

“You’re capable of a higher brand of conversation, Jimmie.”

“Not with you.” “Shall I play the piano? It’s not what I want to do.”

“What in the world do you want to do?”

“Make love.”

He flushed. “I forgot. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Why not? Now you know. Just keep that in mind. Adele left things in the kitchen for making fudge. Chocolate. I love it, and I make the kind that melts in your mouth. We can do that. I can play—anything. I can play Bach and boogie-woogie. Schubert, swing, and Chaminade. A polished amateur—on the juicy side-with a little inattention to technique in the hard spots. Nothing that the average concertgoer would protest too much.”

“Why didn’t you really learn? I mean, get good?”

“I was waiting around for you.”

A log slipped. Jimmie picked up the poker and adjusted it. “That’s going to be your answer to everything, hunh?”

“Yes, Jimmie.”

“Then I can’t drag over here twice a week, when our host and hostess are at the movies, and stand around like a cigar-store Indian while the”—he drew a breath against what seemed like resistance in his lungs—“while one of the most beautiful women I ever saw sits opposite me, using every sentence I pronounce as the spring board for a terrific pass.”

“No. That would be too difficult.”

“So—I better go home.”

Audrey spun on the piano stool so that her back was toward him. The turquoise trimming on her dress shivered infinitesimally. “Yes, Jimmie. If that’s how you really feel.”

“Great God! It’s not how I feel at all!”

She came around again. “Well?”

“But it’s what I think.”

“People do what they feel. Not what they think. If they really feel a way, they make themselves think it’s the right thought—in the end. That’s why I—well, it might be a short world, Jimmie. A short life. I never minded wasting time before, in mine. Now—that’s all that I mind.”

Jimmie stood up. “Audrey, you’d be awesomely easy to take advantage of.”

“If it was an advantage.”

“I assure you, it is. I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re like. And the more I see of you the murkier that idea gets.”

She smiled a little. “I’m just a woman—like all women-and I am in love with you.”

“But how in God’s name do you know?”

“I’m a woman. I don’t like to listen to the gnash and clank of your moral nature, Jimmie. You come some other time.” She gave him his hat. He found himself at the door.

He stammered when he said good night.

But she was calm. “Good night, Jimmie.”