Philip Wylie - The Other Horseman

His feet recited his departure; their sound moved slowly from the white clapboard house, gathered speed and assurance, covered a block, and slowed to a laggard rhythm. A toe dragged; the sound stopped altogether. It was replaced by the thresh and whisper of a hedge as Jimmie angrily yanked at a branch. Soon, his footsteps turned around, started uncertainly back, and presently slapped on the sidewalk in rapid succession: Jimmie was running.

He jumped the white gate in front of the house as cleanly as a deer. He landed in the grass, lightly. Then he stopped. The house was dark. Surprised, uncomprehending, he tiptoed up on its porch. The wisteria vine that had been silhouetted by lamplight was now moon-etched whitely against the blinds. He raised his hand to knock, and lowered it.

From the inside of the unlighted house came a sound—a vague ululation, which might have been weeping or a delicately ominous laughter.

It was the latter thought, scalding and unshakable, which held the man there for a long time, listening, considering. It was possible that Audrey was peering at him from the invisible room and that she could not wholly repress a wanton impulse to chuckle over his return. Or, perhaps, she had not observed him and was amused by his callow departure.

More likely, she was crying. He came to that conclusion. But, in the meanwhile, his impulse withered. He became afraid that he had been trapped by her resemblance to Ellen, by her audacity, by the interested esteem in which Mr. Corinth held her. Those dissensions quickly undid the blind violence of his back-running steps. He slunk diagonally from the house and vaulted the fence. His feet went along the pavement in a dirge-slow, authentic. Jimmie said nothing about that adventure to Mr. Corinth.

He hoped Audrey would recount it. In that event his boss would probably discuss the affair. But the chemist—busy with research, busy with problems of production—did not mention it; so Jimmie assumed, after a few days, that Audrey had kept it secret. Mr.

Corinth, indeed, seemed hourly to be aging; his white hair yellowed; his face shrank; the willowware blue of his eyes washed out; it was as if the fearsome chemicals with which he worked had entered his body and attacked it at every point except the one where his energy originated. Age had done nothing to his brain and nothing to the vigor that energized his long, restless routines. Jimmie threw himself into the job of helping the old man.

Such understanding had sprung up between them that they worked in a manner which suggested their activities had been ordained, or rehearsed elsewhere. They were like backfield men in a ferocious game—Corinth carrying the ball—Jimmie throwing passes, blocking, tackling, running interference. He became familiar with the main outlines of the plant operation, with the war orders and their filling, with the holdovers from what the old man called “peacetime” business.

Often they worked among the low buildings till late at night. Occasionally they slept there, on two cots, in the room the factory employees used by day for smoking.

When they talked it was always about chemistry or business. Jimmie knew this absolution of endeavor was, on his part, honest in one sense alone: he was willing to give every minute he could to the war. But the spare moments, afternoons off, evenings at home, he filled with work merely as an escape, an anesthetic.

He felt impelled to get away from the obsessive quality of his thoughts about Audrey. What she had done to him was bad enough; what she could do was so much worse that he persuaded himself he should avoid it at all costs. He decided that she must be, intrinsically, a destructive person; otherwise she would not have been so quick to attempt his conquest. That decision gave him no peace, however, so he fell back on the doubtful anodyne of overwork. He had other motives, little ones, that kept adding themselves to the constant factor in his work-mania.

One day he spoke to his mother about Sarah’s blighted love affair. He waited until what he thought was the right moment, a rainy afternoon, when his father was at the club—country or athletic, Jimmie did not ask which—and his sister had gone to the movies.

There was no comfort between mother and son, tolerance only, but, with the fire going, the radio playing decent music, and Jimmie ensconced in the living room, in a deep chair, with a book, the time seemed fit enough. Mrs. Bailey was knitting. She, and most of the other women, had taken to knitting this or that for refugees, soldiers, whatnot—in spite of their convictions—out of a habit entrenched by the first world conflict: war, whatever its ideology, meant knitting, and, probably, no sugar. Those two, mainly.

“Mother?”

“Yes, dear?” She said it absently.

Jimmie was encouraged. “I want to ask you about something.”

“Go ahead.”

“I trust you won’t be disturbed.”

She looked at him with sudden rigidity. Her face, an older image of Sarah’s, seemed strong. Its strength came, however, from the adjustments she had forced upon her character, and it was, therefore, the mere strength of compulsion, not the strength of wisdom. “I do hope it’s nothing about the war!”

“No. It’s about Sarah.”

“What about Sarah?” She became querulous, defensive.

“About—some egg named Harry.”

That precipitated a long silence. The fingers stopped knitting, gripped the needles harder, and went on, digging their points. “That—I’d rather not discuss.”

He ignored her preference. “What was the matter with the guy?”

“The whole thing was utterly impossible! Sarah is a mere child. She was even younger when this—this slippery impostor swept her off her feet.”

Jimmie scratched his cheek. “You might as well come clean. I probed Willie Corinth on the subject, and he tapped his wife, Susie, and she didn’t have much. Just that you clipped off Harry like a flower. Pretty nearly everybody in the village liked the lug, at first.”

“I will not discuss it.”

Jimmie grinned. “Sarah’s still in the doghouse with herself about it. She evidently had the big torch in her hand. You know, in some ways, Sarah is pretty mature. And girls have been known to get married-successfully, even-at the age of nineteen, which my nonbenevolent sister is approaching.”

“It was something your father found out,” Mrs. Bailey said, at last. “We never mentioned it. We felt that part was up to Mr. Meade, if anyone. We were only glad that we did find out. We had both been dubious, naturally. The man is a clarinetist. He does have some talent, apparently. And his family is extremely well-to-do. However, what your father learned—”

He was not grinning. “Skeleton in the closet, eh? Was the cluck already married or something?”

She apparently felt that his mood of worry was the best one in which to reveal a matter that would undoubtedly be uncovered sooner or later. Jimmie had a persistence which came, she often said proudly, from her side of the family. She knitted a few stitches as a prologue. “Jimmie, this Mr. Harry Meade is—non-Aryan.”

“Huh!”

“He is one quarter Jewish. Your father found it out on a trip to New York. His family is well known in New York. But his grandmother was a Jewess.”

Jimmie did not say anything for a while. At last, in a quiet, thin voice, he began:

“I dimly remember, Mother, that when Elsie Mac-something—of this town—married Leonard Zimm you helped engineer the whole business. You were fond of Len—”

“The Zimms,” his mother answered, “have lived in this country for five generations. They came with the pioneers. We accepted them, in time, naturally. In those days.”

“What do you mean, “in those days’? Aren’t the Zimms still around?”