Philip Wylie - The Other Horseman

Jimmie shook his head. “Coming here—well, here, you people don’t know what you have been living for. You don’t know what you want to live for in the future. Who you are. What you stand for. You’re scared of every little step that leads you into the future. And yet—the future exists, and some kind of steps must forever be walking toward it. In England they have one job above all others and they are doing it at any cost, because it has hope in it. Here, people just argue day and night—as if the whole course of man’s freedom, the existence of his soul, the promise of his future was a debatable topic—like whether or not to put new traffic signs on Main Street. Oh, hell! You can’t say it.”

Mr. Bailey started to speak and decided to say nothing. He flung the ends of several boards into the fire.

Jimmie stood. “Well, Dad. I probably will be leaving in a few days. I’ll come by.”

“You—you wouldn’t care to spend that time—with us?”

“If you want me to. I’d like it.”

“So would Mother. I dunno. She and I might change, I suppose.” His eye flashed.

“Not that I have, remember! I still think—even if we go in the war, and win, and things are all right afterward—it is not our affair. But it’s damned lonely at the house, now. Biff going—Sarah gone—you. Wilson was over last night. He’s full of conundrums he can’t answer—and tries to. Corinth certainly worked him over before he died. If the old man had lived I’d have bet Wilson would have lost the argument, in the end.”

Jimmie said, “Well—”

“Bring your stuff over before supper, huh?”

“All right.”

Jimmie went into the skating house to change his shoes.

The next day he walked around on the property of the Corinth Paint and Dye Works in a delirious fall of snow. A gang of men were clearing the debris from the rectangles where buildings had burned. As fast as they pried open a fresh, black wound in the whiteness the flakes swirled down upon it, healingly. When the whistle blew for noon and the men quit, Jimmie stalked toward the gate. He was wearing high boots and breeches; under his arm was a roll of blueprints. He waved at the man in the guardhouse.

“Going to lunch, Mat. Be back in about an hour.”

“Okay, Jimmie.”

“Hello.”

There was Audrey parked at the hydrant again.

Parked at the brightly scratched hydrant. Audrey, gleaming and delicious, against the lithographic landscape. She was smiling, as she nearly always was, and her face was sun-tanned to a deeper buff-pink than ever. Jimmie stopped first and came toward her slowly, explaining to himself in an idiot way that she’d gotten the sunburn in the Carolinas. He didn’t climb into the coupe. He walked to the driver’s side. Audrey had opened the window. He leaned on it.

“I hear you’re going to England,” she said. “I stopped by your house.”

“Yeah. In a few days.”

She looked at him. “Running away to think it over didn’t do any good, Jimmie. I threw the whole book at myself—all the rules about what a girl should do when disappointed in love. I traveled. I flirted with other men. I took long walks and got interested in other things. And it was just as phoney for me as a thing could possibly be.

You’re the only man I can never pretend with. You’ve just about—! I don’t know what you’ve done to me.”

“And I don’t know what you’ve done to me, Audrey. Something. I’ve always thought you were a fraud. A complicated fraud, like your dad. Acting. Never real, never sincere, because acting was an obsession. I just about couldn’t stand it—but I always barely could. You see I don’t live just for loving a woman. Not now. Not—ever. Even if I loved you with all my heart and all my life. I still—”

Audrey said, “Goodness.” She wrinkled her nose. “What talk! I understand that! A man who felt any other way wouldn’t be more than a third of a man. One third of a man—two thirds of a ghost. What the hell do you imagine made me fall for you? Why do you suppose I’ve been chasing you like a—a—a little beagle?”

“I thought it was that obsession. You had to prove something.”

She nodded. “Sure. I still do. I have to prove I love you. I have to prove I always will. Now—you’re going to roar away again. To England. So I’ve got to go to England.”

“What!”

“It’ll be a terrible nuisance. I’m broke. I’ll have to volunteer for some kind of job. Borrow money from someone. Vamp the State Department. Get Dad’s friends to high-pressure people. I’ll probably wind up in the Land Army, dressed like you, pitching hay. Instead of—”

Jimmie’s smile was absent-minded. “You really mean that, don’t you? You’re really going to England!”

“If I have to. You ought not to make me though, Jimmie. The only two men I revere are going to be there. You. And Larry, if he still—exists. You say we go to England—so that’s where we go. When I heard about it I was sore for a minute. I thought it was quitting. I thought it was beneath you. After all, you were born an American citizen. If Americans are behaving as badly as you say I thought you ought to stick around and help straighten them out. But I was sore only for a second. If you decide it’s England—I start looking at the travel folders. No matter what I get in, I could see you—once in a while.”

Jimmie thought. “You mean, you believed I ought to stay here, and you nevertheless decided that because I was going there you would?”

“We Wilsons,” Audrey answered, “are a rapacious lot. And also, we never quit! Besides, this is my first experience with being right, and knowing it. I don’t intend to let go of it. Sure, I thought you ought to stay. But I think something else, a lot harder. You’ve heard the theme. ‘Whither thou goest—’ Something of that sort.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!”

“In which case, I will too.” Audrey began to cry.

Jimmie looked over his shoulder, ignoring her tears.

He stared at Willie Corinth’s plant, in the process of reconstruction. A huddle of buildings, melting to nothing behind the shifting curtain of snow. Buildings to house the dreams of men—dreams that could be destructive, and dreams that could be beautiful and creative. Opposites. A quiet hung over the scene, a lunch hour tranquility; at one o’clock the clamor would begin again, the energetic progress of rebuilding on the tomb of the unrecovered ashes of Willie Corinth.

Thinly, far away, a boy’s voice hawked the first edition of the day’s Dispatch.

Something about England. The sharp-angled, stagey scene blurred before Jimmie’s eyes.

This, too, was something about England. Something about all human living. His mind screwed down like a vise until it squeezed out every thought of himself and every feeling about Audrey—until it rigidly gripped one element alone: the symbol he’d named for his father! Man’s freedom, man’s soul, man’s future, man’s hope.

He looked back very slowly. Their eyes met. Across the cold air between them—air misty with his breath—they exchanged surrender and possession.

“All right, Audrey. We’ll stay.”

FARRAR & RINEHART, INC.

NEW YORK TORONTO

COPYRIGHT, 1942, BY PHILIP WYLIE

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