Philip Wylie: The Other Horseman

Dad’s treasurer.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ll find out. Your family’s on it, too.”

They went back to the table, finally. His mother was visibly relieved by his reappearance, and visibly surprised by his evident amiability in the company of Audrey.

Music began—a rhumba. Audrey whispered, “It’s the rage now. We’ll sit it out.”

Jimmie rose with dignity. “London,” he replied, “has not been wholly cut off from the rest of the planet! We shall dance.”

They began. Audrey looked up at him. “I’ll say London hasn’t been cut off! Who taught you?”

“Her name,” he began throbbingly, “was Conchita. She was a little thing with blue-black hair and eyes like the flames in a burning coal mine. Emotions of a tigress in the body of a child—a sepia child. Lovely! Conchita taught me the rhumba. Eight bob per lesson. That’s about a dollar fifty.”

Audrey laughed.

He took her home, late, in a taxi. She asked him to. While they rode through the quiet streets they were silent. The night was growing warmer. Roofs dripped, the snow along the sides of the walks was slushy, and there were patches showing in lawns that looked black under the outreaching lavender murk of arc lights. When they stopped in front of her house—a bigger, more imposing house than his family’s—Audrey said, “Will you kiss me good night, Jimmie? It would sort of finish erasing the mess I made at the start.”

He bent and kissed her perfunctorily.

“Is that all?” she whispered.

He kissed her again—not perfunctorily. And then again, as if to reassure himself about his first impression.

“You’ll forgive me—for Ellen?”

He nodded. “Yes. That all happened summer before last.” Suddenly he grinned.

“You’re not being fair to your mother, Audrey!” He reached past her and opened the cab door.

AT EIGHT O’CLOCK the Baileys—short of sleep and showing it—straggled into their dining room for breakfast. Mr. Bailey had to go to the bank. He was a punctual man.

He regarded the late arrival of executives at business offices as a bad example. Mrs.

Bailey joined her husband, out of custom. She had learned early in her marriage that, whenever she slept late, he found several ways to bring it to her attention publicly—ways that had the outward form of humor and the clear stigmata of a wife-husband friction. Mr.

Bailey had not been able to scare or scourge the second generation into early rising.

He was surprised, then, when Sarah showed up. “Have you been in bed? Or are you just going? I saw you leave the club with Francis Webster along about two.”

“I have an appointment for a fitting. Nine o’clock. Mrs. Gregg didn’t have any other time, worse luck. I’m dead! It’s the dress I’m going to wear tonight at the Wilsons’ party for Jimmie.”

Mr. Bailey chased a piece of bacon with his fork. “Anybody told Jimmie there’s another party for him tonight?” He looked accusingly at his wife.

“I hinted at it rather plainly. And he seems to like—”

Her husband cleared his throat. Biff came into the room, rubbing his eyes and yawning. “Coffee,” he said in a hollow tone. The swinging door banged and the butler came through. “Westcott, bring me a gallon of coffee.”

Mr. Bailey squinted at his son. “Huh! I should think so! I counted up to seven rum collinses last night. What you trying to do—drink yourself to death?”

Biff’s hands were trembling. A light perspiration shone on his face, here and there, in little clusters. “Anybody count yours? I have a hangover you could sell to an amusement park. Make the roller coaster feel like a lawn swing.”

“Who told you that crack?” Sarah asked.

Their father swallowed coffee. A big, square man, growing thinner as he came nearer to sixty. A man with a rectangular face and a chin that rode out beyond his necktie formidably. He wore rimless, angle-sided spectacles. The eyes behind them were china blue, but as bright as glass. His face was ruddy, and the almost unwrinkled skin on it was shaved so close it looked peeled. He wore his wavy gray hair long so that it would fall across his toupee-sized bald spot. He had a good voice, deep, resonant, and not loud unless he wanted it to be. He firmly believed that, in every hour of every day of his life, he had done the right thing—his duty—without consideration of his own pleasure or pain.

That such an attitude is psychologically—even physiologically—dangerous, cannot be denied. But it is the commonest attitude among successful men not just in America, but everywhere. Most people thought Kendrick Bailey was a brilliant man and a good man. In many ways, he was both. He looked, now, at his wife, and he said, “I repeat.

Does Jimmie know that there is another big party for him tonight?”

“Don’t be so hostile,” his wife replied. “I’ll ease him into the fact when he comes down—after he’s had some breakfast. No doubt he’ll sleep late. He must be very tired—going through submarine zones and all that. He certainly looked it when he got off the train.”

“He looked rotten,” Biff said comfortably. “The lousy interventionist!”

“Hannah,” said Mr. Bailey to his wife, “we made a mistake with that boy. Should never have allowed him to go to Oxford. He got the European taint.”

“It was the ‘V’ on his luggage,” Sarah said, “that was so darned corny! The very first thing I saw—even before I saw Jimmie—was that big suitcase Biff and I gave him for a going-away present, and that enormous red, white, and blue ‘V.’ He might at least have had the decency to find out that the better people in his own home town aren’t having any part of things like that!”

“I was kind of proud of that ‘V,’” Jimmie said.

Biff dropped his knife. Sarah flinched. Mr. Bailey spun in his chair. Hannah Bailey said, “James! You must quit sneaking up and listening in on what people are saying! That’s the second time you’ve been eavesdropping!”

Jimmie came into the dining room and looked cheerfully at his family and at the bright sun outside; he sat down in the empty place. “Oh, I eavesdrop all the time.” He was flushing a little, but his words did not show that he was in any way embarrassed. “It’s counterespionage that does it.”

“What?” said his mother.

Jimmie answered blandly, “Counterspying. In wartime England you get in the habit of slipping up quietly on every conversation. You know. The lovely old man in the walrus mustache taking tea with the beautiful young girl may well be a fifth columnist.

The bobby under Nelson’s statue ostensibly giving directions to the cockney errand boy may be Baron Hoffmann, chief of the Gestapo, telling a messenger the location of an AA battery—”

“He’s kidding, Mother,” Sarah said. The butler came in and looked inquisitively at Jimmie.

“Some bloaters, Westcott, and a bit of cold pork pie—” Jimmie chuckled at the man’s expression. “I want anything strictly American in the kitchen! Everything, in fact.”

Westcott smiled understandingly and hurried out.

Mr. Bailey scowled. “You know, son, I suppose, that there’s another party to be given for you tonight.”

“Is there?”

“The Wilsons’.”

Mrs. Bailey glanced indignantly at her husband and amiably at her elder son. “It’s really a ‘must,’ dear. I’m dreadfully sorry you got up so early. You must take a good, long nap this afternoon.”

“I had to get up,” Jimmie said pleasantly. “Work.”

“What is there so terrifically important about that work?” Sarah sounded honestly puzzled. “Me—if I were you—I’d take a month off, enjoy the food in a country that still has sense enough to stay out of war, go to the club, pick out a whole harem of women and indulge my more frivolous nature to the limit—”