Philip Wylie - The Other Horseman

“No, James. They moved, more than a year ago. To Chicago.”

Jimmie hopped to his feet. “So that’s it! Sarah didn’t tell me, the louse! She gave him up—when she found out the truth!”

Mrs. Bailey looked at her tall son with eyes that gleamed oddly. “Sarah gave him up. Naturally.”

He slapped his book together. “Fine business! I think I’ll go down to the lab for the night. I don’t want to hear, Mother, about how the Jews, a little minority of them in every nation, have succeeded—although they are an admittedly inferior people!—in stealing all the money and the power from us big, bold, better gentiles, and making suckers out of us in business, and finally in so befuddling our mighty minds that they have destroyed the ninety-five per cent of us, sacked our civilization, and thrust us into war. Phooie, on you! I knew you and Dad were pretty nuts, Mother! This is the first intimation I’ve had, though, that you were feasting on the bloody knuckles of people who can’t protest, even, without causing a fresh hundred of their relatives to hang by their thumbs and their breasts. God damn it! I can’t stand it!” He went out.

Hard on the heels of that episode, came another—and then another. The first was minor, but it distressed Jimmie. The second was more bitter.

On the day after he had stalked away from his mother’s intolerance, with the hot belief that Sarah had been a traitor to her man, he called on Biff. He was beginning to like Biff, to feel that his brother had a soul. It was a young soul, wounded and arrogant, but susceptible of maturation. It needed care. Jimmie believed that Biff was caring for it, as he lay on his monotonous bed, thinking slow thoughts about his life, and reading long books about the realities around him.

Jimmie had formed the habit of cutting over to the hospital on his walk to work or his return from work, of rapping on his brother’s door and sitting in the easy chair for a few minutes. This time, remembering that Biff’s room was bare, like the rooms of most slow-healing invalids whose friends and relatives have grown inattentive, he stopped at a florist’s and bought a bunch of chrysanthemums. Because his arms were filled with the flowers Jimmie kicked open the door of the room.

He found Biff locked in an embrace with a nurse. The same pretty nurse who had been kidding with Dr. Heiffler on the night Jimmie had conferred with him. They broke apart. The nurse flushed—but not much; it was a defiant flush, a tantalizing flush, rather than the swift reddening one might have expected. She looked boldly at Jimmie, patted Biff’s cheek, and went out of the room.

Biff chuckled. “You’re the darnedest guy! Always popping into things!”

“Not that I want to! You people are always doing things. What’s the idea? She’s a poor working gal, Biff. You’re too irresistible to take advantage of her. Too much dough.

Too much family.”

Biff laughed harder. “Take advantage of Genevieve? Look. How many times does a girl have to be taken advantage of before she’s out of the minor league?”

Jimmie unwrapped the flowers. He was still fairly unruffled. “Not a nice thing to say.”

“All my pals have had dates with Genevieve. Can’t imagine how I overlooked her, myself. She’s pretty, eh?”

“Sure.” Jimmie sat down on the edge of the bed. “You’re pretty, too, Biff. Nice eyes—State football hero—whatnot. I suppose the gals in your gang won’t come in and neck with a pair of plaster casts. Still—a nurse! Tchk-tchk!”

“You take her out, Jimmie. She’s a nice dish. Do you good. You look like a cold baked potato—more every day. Too much work. And Genevieve knows all the answers.

Lives on the wrong side of the tracks, but with a face and a chassis like that a dame can cross ’em—”

“Aren’t you being just a shade-hard-boiled, Biff?”

“You sore?”

Jimmie walked over to the window. “Not exactly.”

Biff laughed sharply. “You know, sometimes the family is right about you. You’re a meddlesome cluck. And too darned high-and-mighty. If you’re trying to lecture me on personal behavior—quit! And the next time you come over here—knock.”

“All right.”

“I don’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“You aren’t hurting ’em.” Jimmie smiled—but he was aware that his feelings were hurt.

“Y ou get your legs broken,” Biff said, with a tinge of self-pity. “Y ou try lying around in a hospital, week in and out. You see what you’d do if a sophisticated babe came in and offered to make the time go a lot faster.”

“All right, wise guy,” Jimmie said. “All right. I’ll go quietly.” He did go. He supposed that he had been meddlesome and toplofty. It wasn’t any of his business. Still, it wasn’t right, either. And Jimmie felt that not-right behavior was everybody’s business. So, he decided, maybe he was priggish. Maybe he was a blithering fool. He strode along the cold street toward the paint works and he thought of Audrey and his temples swelled. The world was cock-eyed—and doing itself no good by being that way.

Two days later, his father threw him out.

It was his fault.

After he had moved his things over to the country club, which was nearer the factory, anyway—after he had settled in a chintz-draped room that overlooked the golf course, he began to see that he had almost consciously precipitated the banishment, in the same righteous way in which he’d got himself into so many other fights….

A few days after his irritated criticism of Biff he had set up a slow distillation in his lab, left it in charge of one of the men, and gone home at four o’clock. Because he seldom reached home until seven—and because, in any case, his presence would have been egregious—nobody had told him about the meeting.

He saw a number of cars parked on the street and in the drive. He thought that his mother was having a female party. He planned to wave at her from the hall, go up to his room, and hide. In fact, he got up momentum to make the trip through the hall a fast one.

However, when he opened the door he smelled cigar smoke and he heard the mumble of men’s voices. That stopped him. Somebody in the living room caught sight of him and waved. Heads turned.

Someone else said, “There’s Jimmie!”

Several men laughed.

Still another man called, “Hello, Jimmie! Come on in and see how the last little band of Americans is clinging to the Faith!”

So Jimmie went in. He went, because he was interested. This was some subcommittee from the America Forever Committee. Jimmie looked at his father, who sat behind the big table, as chairman, evidently, and Jimmie’s eyes were bright with satire.

His father put on a stuffy expression and said, “Join us, James. That is, if you want, sincerely, to see the opposition at work. And if you can remember that opposition is one of the honest functions of democracy.”

Jimmie nodded meekly and sprawled in a leather chair. For a while the meeting amused him. An American ship had been fired on by a submarine, and it appeared that the Muskogewan members of America Forever had passed a resolution “suggesting” that the submarine had been English. Then the Germans had admitted it was their submarine.

The incident was two months old, but due to it, the America Forever Committee in Muskogewan had been grossly lampooned in a new issue of a monthly magazine. Their first agendum was to draw up a resolution informing the magazine that England had perfidiously drawn America into the war. They next framed a resolution to stay out of war.

After that a long telegram was read. It came from a gentleman of national importance. Its purport was that, even with a congressional declaration of war, the work of America Forever would go forward. Such a declaration, the message said, could only be regarded as the act of a body of rubberstamps who no longer represented the people, or held the power originally vested in them by the Constitution but now assumed by a band of thieves. In view of the fact that no act of Congress could be considered responsible, the wire said, the members of America Forever were urged to disregard all such acts. And so on.