Philip Wylie - The Other Horseman

He was a nice chap, Jimmie thought. Humorous, clever, and violently but adroitly in love with his wife. They stopped at the club for a quarter of an hour and hurried away—in the midst of laughter. Honeymoon on the West Coast. From the rice-dripping new roadster, Sarah yelled to Jimmie, “Tell Audrey we love her to pieces! We couldn’t reach her or we’d have had her at the wedding!” Gears meshing. Tires slipping. Old shoes kicking on the gravel.

That was all. His work was going badly. Three weeks to learn that a process was misconceived. Another three, before that, spent only to be beaten to the same objective by a Czech chemist in New York.

Then the letter came.

A letter opened by the Censor. A letter from Froggie, in the lab, in London.

Jimmie snatched it from the desk clerk and vaulted up to his room, where the chintz curtains stood bright and stiff against a backdrop of muddy fairways, snow blotches, and the hanging smoke of far-off freight car locomotives.

“DEAR JIMMIE:

“We discovered last night that not one of us had written you yet. Covered the whole staff with humiliation. Now we’ve set up a routine. Drew lots—I’m first on the list—drank you a ripping toast, the gist of which I will not tell you because, I understand, the censors are sometimes ladies—and you ought to get word from the Smythe Lab regularly now.

“I was about to say that there wasn’t much news and no change to speak of. But I looked at the calendar—back over the time between the party we threw for your going-away at the Ritz, and now—and there’s quite a packet of news, after all. It’s a long time, these days. Binnie got it. Went over with some new—” the next line was missing from the letter—“and the flack caught him over a town you have seen, which the Russians would have called H in their dispatches. The bomb load blew—so it was quick and painless.

“Sommes is minus the left pinkie—very proud of it—thinks they ought to decorate him. He stirred up one of those fabulous messes he is famous for—the kind you used to call ‘blue sky’ chemistry—and it didn’t precisely explode, but it got hot and spattery and a chunk of it burned away the pinkie neatly at the second joint. We gave him a little dinner at Gigli’s last week, and had the dessert served with ladyfingers Gigli himself baked, the replica of the missing digit—very realistic—said patisserie requiring no end of food coupons. Great success. Pinkie made a speech about the Empire and so on after the sixth double brandy—the last, incidentally. Very fine oration—and cribbed, in toto, it later proved, from an early treatise by the PM. Serious little blighter, but a lot of chemist. Girls dancing attendance at the affair: Maude, Ginger, Tess, Evelyn, Daisy, Rochelle, and Therese. Missed you—had an empty chair with a stuffed chimp in it for your proxy. ‘That’s all our casualties. Over at the field, there’s—” more words were missing—’and the list, since your time, is this: Gone—Waite, Petherbey, Pondonce, Bruntie, Tavis, Evans. Prisoners of war—Cochrane, Simms, Bort, Crummin. In the hosp. and slated to pull out in decent shape—Tedwell and Melby. In the hosp, and not to pull out much—Coates, with burns, and Timmens, all broken up like matchsticks.

“Guess you knew most of them. It’s depressing and maybe you’d rather not have the list, but we all decided you’d prefer to know. We’ve been giving the Jerries raw hell, in stepped-up doses, for a long while now, and the hell comes at a high price, both ways—which you’re aware of anyhow and I’m an idiot for saying.

“Cullen had an argument with Betsy Pell in the tea garden the other day. She poured a whole tray of dishes over his bean. Sommes went under the table like a fancy diver—thought the clatter was some new present from Jerry. Cullen brushed off the crockery and caught Betsy with a siphon—full on. They’re apart, now. Evelyn got Cullen on the rebound. And Betsy got Evelyn’s Edgar. Which will calm down life in the university set here for the winter, as you can imagine.

“Davis hasn’t come out of his cubicle for a week and a half—they sent in a cot and food goes through the door, regularly. So we’re all expecting something big any minute. You know what he was working on, and there’s about ten quid up, all told, on whether he gets it or not. If the answer is yes, and if I were a Berliner, I’d leave the city for the Christmas holidays—and stay away for the next year or two.

“Meanwhile 500 kgs. of Jerry’s best caught the west wing of the old lab last Thursday night. Nobody in it, thank God. Just a stray ship with one big bomb—and a lucky hit, I think, though the head insists it was the result of a fifth column steer. Nothing undone we can’t do over. If you find time, drop us a note about America. Any little thing you think of—how it feels not to have a war going on and a blitz around the corner every second. Send a snapshot of your ugly phiz. We haven’t one, we find, to our dismay. There are forty-odd million of us on this not-so-right and certainly not-tight-little-isle, who get misty these days thinking about your America. If there was a song called ‘God Bless the Yankees’ it would damned near replace ‘God Save the King’—certainly rival it. I know you don’t like tosh, but can’t restrain a note of it. I saw one of your convoys come in at—you may guess where—a fortnight ago, and I jolly well cheered myself into a laryngitis.

Well, God help the Boche—and Merry Christmas, for when it rolls around.

Jimmie read the letter six or seven times. Each time he stopped at the lists of names and eyed them, individually. The lowering dark came down. He sat by his window, dry-eyed, until past dinnertime—alone, overwhelmed with recollections, nostalgia, affection.

Toward ten o’clock he went downstairs and sat at a table in the cellar bar. He had a sandwich and some beer and coffee. Upstairs in the main dining room an orchestra was playing and the Saturday crowd danced tirelessly. The long brown beams that supported the floor seemed to bend perceptibly with each accent of the music and the feet of the people making an incessant, treading sound. The effect was maddening. After Jimmie had finished his coffee he went back up the stairs. To reach his rooms he had to pass through the foyer. On an impulse he looked into the salon. He was going to write an answer to Froggie’s letter and he wondered what the fellows at Smythe’s Laboratories would think if they could be hanging over his shoulder, watching these people enjoy themselves—well clad, stuffed with food, at peace, and not wanting war so fiercely they could not see the witless willfulness of this war.

Jimmie decided the fellows would be scared by the sight. It would make them bitter. Then they’d try to laugh it off. Try to apologize for the mood and the attitude of the people on this dance floor, because these people, alone, sustained them.

He was vaguely surprised to see his brother at one of the side tables. Jimmie looked for Genevieve, but she was not with Biff. Not there at all, evidently. Biff had another girl. He was holding her hand under the table and the girl was nodding. Girls would always be holding Biff’s hand under tables—and nodding, Jimmie thought. This was a young girl. Seventeen, maybe only sixteen. She had dazzling blue eyes and yellow hair, and her thrill at possessing such an escort was rendered by vehement effort into an almost tangible determination to look sophisticated, to act sophisticated, to be sophisticated—no matter what.

Jimmie went away from the door.

The radiator in his room was clanking. He fussed with it for a while and managed to exchange the clank for a hiss-and-dribble. Then he sat down to instruct his mind in the exact mood required for the writing of a letter to the fellows. It took a long time to choose a mood. Afterward he moved to the wicker desk and made a score of false starts.