Philip Wylie - The Other Horseman

Rather—in between. That’s the other way they die.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

“I mean, not one of them is alive—the way you and I are right here now. Not one can be—till the war’s over. The day it is over, those who happen to remain alive will find it out. That’s all.”

“I see. You know a lot about the RAF.”

“Everybody—in England—thinks about them a lot. Everybody owes ’em—whatever they happen to have.”

“Know any?”

Jimmie smiled. “Yeah. There was a field not very far from our lab. We made some special stuff for them to drop on Germany—now and then. Trial stuff. I used to—I got to be pals with a bunch of them.”

“I see.”

“They could tell you things!”

Jimmie began to tell those things. For half an hour—because of the ardent attention of his listener, because of his unexpected proffer of something very much like friendliness—Jimmie talked. He hadn’t told any of those tales in America. It did him good to unburden himself. For half an hour, in that corner of a clubroom, flack broke, machine guns stuttered, bombs screamed, motors droned and coughed, men died, men lived to tell of death, planes made their runs across the black and ruined ribs of cities embossed upon their incandescent streets, and the old man hung on the words of the young one.

When Jimmie stopped, apologetically, Mr. Wilson said, “You sound as if you’d seen it.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean—personally.”

“Yeah.”

A pause. “You can’t be saying—!”

Jimmie chuckled. “A few times. After all, they had to have an expert along occasionally to observe the effect of that ‘special stuff’ I talked about. Don’t get me wrong! I never had any of that night-after-night, week-in-and-out grind. That’s the killer.

Just a few—oh, hell! A few junkets. As passenger. Deluxe trips. I wish—”

The older man leaned forward. His face was strange. “That—that wound on your leg!”

Jimmie reddened. He was going to lie again, but he changed his mind. Sooner or later they’d all know, anyway. The people in England did. His friends. Whatnot. The hell with it. He said, casually, “Not window glass, no. But what the deuce! What’s the dif? A scratch—that’s all. Somebody who gets clipped with a splinter from the leg of a—a billiard table is clipped as bad as somebody that gets it out of a muzzle on a Messerschmitt, isn’t he?”

Without answering, Mr. Wilson rose and walked away. Jimmie watched him—hurt, again—until he realized he was corning back. He brought a magazine. He spread it out on Jimmie’s knees. He switched on a bridge lamp. It was a picture magazine, and he had turned to a spread of photographs of night fighters getting ready for action somewhere in England. He put his long forefinger on one of the pictures. “These birds are Canadians. See that chap—fourth from the left? The one with the bum haircomb? In the caption it says his name is Lawrence Wilton. My son—ran away—when he was fifteen. That’s—my son.”

MR. CORINTH HAD fallen into the habit of “barging over to the club” occasionally in the evenings, when he and Jimmie were not staying late at the laboratory.

He liked to sit in a wicker chair on the glassed—in sun porch—surrounded by Jimmie, and anybody else who cared to listen—and expound topics of the day, or the ages. He said that his resumption of “social life” was inevitable and a sign of senescence. Jimmie knew the real cause. Mr. Corinth came because he was worried about his colleague—about Jimmie.

And Jimmie was worried about himself. All the locks in all the doors of his life had been turned—if the one door of hard work could be excepted.

He did riot see his father and mother at all. They had sent word that his presence at the club prevented them from coming there, and they had made sure that the bearer of the news also conveyed their resentment. But Jimmie felt too numb to budge. He had not seen Audrey, nor talked to Mr. Corinth about her. In spite of their intimacy Audrey’s name had become mysteriously taboo. His criticism of Biff’s behavior with the pretty nurse had led to a rapid deterioration of their burgeoning relationship. He did not see his sister either, because he now regarded her with contempt. She had abandoned her beloved Harry when she had learned that he was a quarter “non-Aryan,” and yet she had gone on mourning him in a revolting indulgence of self-pity. Mr. Wilson’s friendship, if it had ever been proffered, had been withdrawn. He nodded to Jimmie when they encountered each other, or waved a finger, in a way that looked amiable enough but did not invite further intimacy.

He had at first taken a considerable lift from their talk. Mr. Wilson was, no doubt, all that Audrey had said-bigoted, cruel, a tyrant at home, a fanatic about the behavior of his son and daughter. But Mr. Wilson was more. He was very subtle in his dealings with human beings. He had brought Jimmie around to satisfying a hunger for knowledge about the RAF by flattery, and by a still better trick: by granting to Jimmie the recognition due a valorous antagonist. Jimmie had talked—it must have been brutal to some part of the old man; he’d fumbled his cigar once, but, as soon as Mr. Wilson’s curiosity had been satisfied, he had cast Jimmie aside. Because he was Audrey’s father, Jimmie thought that by understanding Mr. Wilson he might learn about Audrey. So, in spite of a disillusionment, Jimmie had hoped to see more of the father of the night fighter and of the audacious woman.

Since Mr. Wilson had immediately dissolved the connection, Jimmie could only conclude that he was parasitical, that he deftly extracted from other human beings the nutriment for his own concealed emotions and discarded the people as soon as they had no further usefulness. That opinion of the father blindly transferred itself to the daughter.

Because she was bored, Jimmie decided, because she was fed up with Muskogewan, and no doubt justly annoyed at her family, she had invented an emotional stage—set, with all the props of a wicked father and a little white cottage for night rendezvous; and she had stepped out in front of that scenery to sing her siren song—her torch song—or whatever it was.

An act.

So Jimmie had nobody for company.

He could have had the pick of many people.

Mr. Corinth had “made him acquainted” with numerous citizens who did not agree with the ruling caste on the matter of war. Their shades of opinion, however, were very complex, and Jimmie tired of arguing over trifles. Besides, when a person cannot have the friendship of those with whom he wishes to be friends, alternatives are seldom acceptable. The same principle held in the matter of female companionship. As Sarah had said, there were countless girls who would have rescued Jimmie from any doldrum at the slightest sign of a chance, girls, even, who were the daughters of isolationists but who considered matrimony more important than war, girls who were, as Audrey had said, “dashing daughters,” easily relished.

To them, he was polite and no more.

The glassed-in porch, one windy night, was occupied by a dozen people who had ranged themselves haphazardly around Mr. Corinth. Conversation flowed from him, sparked occasionally by a question or a phrase of disagreement. Jimmie listened, with the rest. His attention stiffened when Mr. Wilson idly sat down on the fringe of the group.

“I know it isn’t fashionable,” said Mr. Corinth, “but a woman is a man’s opposite.

Women are the opposite of men. Everything has an opposite that’s as real as it is. The very fashion itself—the fashion of thinking men and women are alike—will change too.

Because fashions are attitudes, and every social attitude that doesn’t take into consideration the law of opposites is bound to get turned upside down, sooner or later.”