You Can't Go Home Again/Book III

◄  BOOK II - THE WORLD THAT JACK BUILT

You Can't Go Home Again BOOK III. - AN END AND A BEGINNING written by Thomas Wolfe

BOOK IV. - THE QUEST OF THE FAIR MEDUSA  ►

The Sun Dial Press 1942 (pages 323-396)

When a cicada comes out of the ground to enter the last stage of its life cycle, it looks more like a fat, earth-stained grub-worm than a winged thing. Laboriously it climbs up the trunk of a tree, pulling itself along on legs that hardly seem to belong to it, for they move with painful awkwardness as though the creature had not yet got the hang of how to use them. At last it stops in its weary climb and clings to the bark by its front feet. Then, suddenly, there is a little popping sound, and one notices that the creature’s outer garment has split down the back, as neatly as though it had come equipped with a zipper. Slowly now the thing inside begins to emerge, drawing itself out through the opening until it has freed its body, head, and all its members. Slowly, slowly, it accomplishes this amazing task, and slowly creeps out into a patch of sun, leaving behind the brown and lifeless husk from which it came.

The living, elemental protoplasm, translucent, pale green now, remains motionless for a long time in the sun, but if one has the patience to watch it further, one will see the miracle of change and growth enacted before his very eyes. After a while the body begins to pulse with life, it flattens out and changes colour like a chameleon, and from small sprouts on each side of the back the wings commence to grow. Quickly, quickly now, they lengthen out—one can see it happening!—until they become transparent fairy wings, iridescent, shimmering in the sun. They begin to quiver delicately, then more rapidly, and all at once, with a metallic whirring sound, they cut the air and the creature flashes off, a new-born thing released into a new element.

America, in the autumn of 1929, was like a cicada. It had come to an end and a beginning. On October 24th, in New York, in a marble-fronted building down in Wall Street, there was a sudden crash that was heard throughout the land. The dead and outworn husk of the America that had been had cracked and split right down the back, and the living, changing, suffering thing within—the real America, the America that had always been, the America that was yet to be—began now slowly to emerge. It came forth into the light of day, stunned, cramped, crippled by the bonds of its imprisonment, and for a long time it remained in a state of suspended animation, full of latent vitality, waiting, waiting patiently, for the next stage of its metamorphosis.

The leaders of the nation had fixed their gaze so long upon the illusions of a false prosperity that they had forgotten what America looked like. Now they saw it—saw its newness, its raw crudeness, and its strength—and turned their shuddering eyes away. “Give us back our well-worn husk,” they said, “where we were so snug and comfortable.” And then they tried word-magic. “Conditions are fundamentally sound,” they said—by which they meant to reassure themselves that nothing now was really changed, that things were as they always had been, and as they always would be, for ever and ever, amen.

But they were wrong. They did not know that you can’t go home again. America bad come to the end of something, and to the beginning of something else. But no one knew what that something else would be, and out of the change and the uncertainty and the wrongness of the leaders grew fear and desperation, and before long hunger stalked the streets. Through it all there was only one certainty, though no one saw it yet. America was still America, and whatever new thing came of it would be American.

George Webber was just as confused and fearful as everybody else. If anything, he was more so, because, in addition to the general crisis, he was caught in a personal one as well. For at this very time he, too, had come to an end and a beginning. It was an end of love, though not of loving; a beginning of recognition, though not of fame. His book was published early in November, and that event, so eagerly awaited for so long, produced results quite different from any he had expected. And during this period of his life he learned a great deal that he had never known before, but it was only gradually, in the course of the years to come, that he began to realise how the changes in himself were related to the larger changes in the world around him.

22. A Question of Guilt

Throughout George Webber’s boyhood in the little town of Libya Hill, when the great vision of the city burned for ever in his brain, he had been athirst for glory and had wanted very much to be a famous man. That desire had never changed, except to become stronger as he grew older, until now he wanted it more than ever. Yet, of the world of letters in which he dreamed of cutting a great figure, he knew almost nothing. He was now about to find out a few things that were to rob his ignorance of its bliss.

His novel,  Home to Our Mountains, was published the first week in November 1929. The date, through the kind of accidental happening which so often affects the course of human events, and which, when looked back on later, seems to have been attended by an element of fatality, coincided almost exactly with the beginning of the Great American Depression.

The collapse of the Stock Market, which had begun in late October, was in some ways like the fall of a gigantic boulder into the still waters of a lake. The suddenness of it sent waves of desperate fear moving in ever-widening circles throughout America. Millions of people in the far-off hamlets, towns, and cities did not know what to make of it. Would its effects touch them? They hoped not. And the waters of the lake closed over the fallen boulder, and for a while most Americans went about their day’s work just as usual.

But the waves of fear had touched them, and life was not quite the same. Security was gone, and there was a sense of dread and ominous foreboding in the air. It was into this atmosphere of false calm and desperate anxiety that Webber’s book was launched.

It is no part of the purpose of this narrative to attempt to estimate the merits or deficiences of Home to Our Mountains. It need only be said here that it was a young man’s first book, and that it had a good many of the faults and virtues of the kind of thing it was. Webber had done what so many beginning writers do: he had written it out of the experience of his own life. And that got him into a lot of trouble.

He was to become convinced as he grew older that if one wants to write a book that has any interest or any value whatever, he has got to write it out of the experience of life. A writer, like everybody else must use what he has to use. He can’t use something that he hasn’t got. If he tries to—and many writers have tried it—what he writes is no good. Everybody knows that.

So Webber had drawn upon the experience of his own life. He had written about his home town, about his family and the people he had known there. And he, had done it in a manner of naked directness and reality that was rather rare in books. That was really what caused the trouble.

Every author’s first book is important. It means the world to him. Perhaps he thinks that what he has done has never been done before. Webber thought so. And in a way he was right. He was still very much under the influence of James Joyce, and what he had written was a Ulysses kind of book. People at home, whose good opinion he coveted more than that of all the rest of the world combined, were bewildered and overwhelmed by it. They, of course, had not read Ulysses. And Webber had not read people. He thought he had, he thought he knew what they were like, but he really didn’t. He hadn’t learned what a difference there is between living with them and writing about them.

A man learns a great deal about life from writing and publishing a book. When Webber wrote his, he had ripped off a mask that his home town had always worn, but he had not quite understood that he was doing it. Only after it was printed and published did he fully realise the fact. All he had meant and hoped to do was to tell the truth about life as he had known it. But no sooner was the thing done—the proofs corrected, the pages printed beyond recall—than he knew that he had not told the truth. Telling the truth is a pretty hard thing. And in a young man’s first attempt, with the distortions of his vanity, egotism, hot passion, and lacerated pride, it is almost impossible.Home to Our Mountains was marred by all these faults and imperfections. Webber knew this better than anybody else, and long before any reader had a chance to tell him so. He did not know whether he had written a great book—sometimes he thought he had, or at least that there were elements of greatness in it. He did know that it was not altogether a true book. Still, there was truth in it. And this was what people were afraid of. This was what made them mad.

As the publication day drew near, Webber felt some apprehension about the reception of his novel in Libya Hill. Ever since his trip home in September he had had a heightened sense of uneasiness and anxiety. He had seen the boom-mad town tottering on the brink of ruin. He had read in the eyes of people on the streets the fear and guilty knowledge of the calamity that impended and that they were still refusing to admit even to themselves. He knew that they were clinging desperately to the illusion of their paper riches, and that madness such as this was unprepared to face reality and truth in any degree whatever.

But even if he had been unaware of these special circumstances of the moment, he would still have had some premonitory consciousness that he was in for something. For he was a Southerner, and he knew that there was something wounded in the South. He knew that there was something twisted, dark, and full of pain which Southerners have known with all their lives—something rooted in their souls beyond all contradiction, about which no one had dared to write, of which no one had ever spoken.

Perhaps it came from their old war, and from the ruin of their great defeat and its degraded aftermath. Perhaps it came from causes yet more ancient—from the evil of man’s slavery, and the hurt and shame of human conscience in its struggle with the fierce desire to own. It came, too, perhaps, from the lusts of the hot South, tormented and repressed below the harsh and outward patterns of a bigot and intolerant theology, yet prowling always, stirring stealthily, as hushed and secret as the thickets of swamp-darkness. And most of all, perhaps, it came out of the very weather of their lives, out of the forms that shaped them and the food that fed them, out of the unknown terrors of the skies above them, out of the dark, mysterious pineland all round them with its haunting sorrow.

Wherever it came from, it was there—and Webber knew it.

But it was not only in the South that America was hurt. There was another deeper, darker, and more nameless wound throughout the land. What was it? Was it in the record of corrupt officials and polluted governments, administrations twisted to the core, the huge excess of privilege and graft, protected criminals and gangster rule, the democratic forms all rotten and putrescent with disease? Was it in “puritanism”—that great, vague name: whatever it may be? Was it in the bloated surfeits of monopoly, and the crimes of wealth against the worker’s life? Yes, it was in all of these, and in the daily tolling of the murdered men, the lurid renderings of promiscuous and casual slaughter everywhere throughout the land, and in the pious hypocrisy of the Press with its swift-forgotten prayers for our improvement, the editorial moaning while the front page gloats.

But it is not only at these outward forms that we must look to find the evidence of a nation’s hurt. We must look as well at the heart of guilt that beats in each of us, for there the cause lies. We must look, and with our own eyes see, the central core of defeat and shame and failure which we have wrought in the lives of even the least of these, our brothers. And why must we look? Because we must probe to the bottom of our collective wound. As men, as Americans, we can no longer cringe away and lie. Are we not all warmed by the same sun, frozen by the same cold, shone on by the same lights of time and terror here in America? Yes, and if we do not look and see it, we shall be all damned together.

So George Webber had written a book in which he had tried, with only partial success, to tell the truth about the little segment of life that he had seen and known. And now he was worried about what the people back in his home town would think of it. He thought a few of them would “read it”. He was afraid there would be “talk”. He supposed that there might even be a protest here and there, and he tried to prepare himself for it. But when it came, it went so far beyond anything he had feared might happen that it caught him wholly unawares and almost floored him. He had felt, but had not known before, how naked we are here in America.

It was a time when the better-known gentlemen and lady authors of the South were writing polished bits of whimsey about some dear Land of Far Cockaigne, or ironic little comedies about the gentle relics of the Old Tradition in the South, or fanciful bits about Negro mongrels along the Battery in Charleston, or, if passion was in the air, amusing and light-hearted tales about the romantic adulteries of dusky brethren and their “high-yaller gals” on a plantation somewhere. There wasn’t much honesty or essential reality in these books, and the people who wrote them had not made much effort to face the facts in the life round them. One wrote about Cockaigne because it was far enough away to be safe; and if one wanted to write about adultery, or about crime and punishment of any sort, it was a good deal safer to let it happen to a group of darkies than to the kind of people one had to live with every day.

Home to Our Mountains was a novel that did not fit into any of these standardised patterns. It didn’t seem to have much pattern at all. The people of Libya Hill hardly knew what to make of it at first. Then they recognised themselves in it. From that point on, they began to live it all over again. People who had never bought a book before bought this one. Libya Hill alone bought two thousand copies of it. It stunned them, it overwhelmed them, and in the end it made them fight.

For George Webber had used the scalpel in a way that that section of the country was not accustomed to. His book took the hide off of the whole community, and as a result of this it also took the hide off of George Webber.

In Libya Hill, a day or two before the publication of the book, Margaret Shepperton met Harley McNabb on the street. They exchanged greetings and stopped to talk.

“Have you seen the book?” he said.

“Yes, George sent me an advance copy,” she answered, beaming at him, “and he signed it for me, too. But I haven’t read it. It just came this morning. Have you seen it?”

“Yes,” he said. “We have a review copy in the office.”

“What do you think of it?” She looked at him with the expression of a large and earnest woman who lets herself be governed considerably by the opinion of those round her mean—“now you’ve been to college, Harley,” she began jestingly, but also rather eagerly. “It may be deep stuff to me—but you ought to know—you’re educated—you ought to be a judge about these things. What I mean is, do you think it’s good?”

He was silent for a moment, his lean hand fingering the bowl of his blackened briar, on which he puffed thoughtfully. Then:

“Margaret,” he said, “it’s pretty rough…Now don’t get excited,” he added quickly as he saw her large face contract with anxiety and concern. “No use getting excited about it—but”—he paused, puffing on his pipe, his eyes staring off into vacancy—“there—there are some pretty rough things in it. It’s—it’s pretty frank, Margaret.”

She felt the gathering in her of sharp tensions, a white terror, personal, immediate, as she said almost hoarsely:

“About me? About me, Harley? Is that what you mean? Are there things in it—about me?” Her face was tortured now, and she felt an indescribable sense of fear and guilt.

“Not only about you,” he said. “About—well, Margaret, about everybody—about a lot of people here in town…You’ve known him all your life, haven’t you? You see—well—he’s put in everybody he ever knew. Some of it is going to be pretty hard to take.”

For a moment, in a phrase she was fond of using, she “went all to pieces”. She began to talk wildly, incoherently, her large features contorted under the strain:

“Well, now, I’m sure I don’t know what he’s got to say about me!…Well, now, if anyone feels that way—” without knowing how anyone felt. “What I mean to say is, I certainly don’t feel that I’ve got anything to be ashamed of…You know me, Harley,” she went on eagerly, almost beseechingly, “I’m known in this town—I’ve got friends here—everybody knows me…Well, I certainly have nothing to conceal.”

“I know you haven’t, Margaret,” he said. “Only—well, there’s going to be talk.”

She felt emptied out, hollow, her knees were weak. His words had almost knocked her over. If he said it, it must be so, even though she did not yet understand what it was he had said. She only knew that she was in the book, and that Harley didn’t like it; and his opinion stood for something, for a great deal, in her own eyes and in the eyes of the whole town. He represented what her mind called, somewhat vaguely, “the high-brow element”. He had always been “a fine man”. He stood for truth, for culture, for learning, and for high integrity. So she looked at him with her bewildered face and stricken eyes, and, just as a young soldier, with his entrails shot out in his hands, speaks to the commander of his life, saying in his deadly fear and peril: “Is it bad, General? Do you think it’s bad?”—so now she said hoarsely to the editor, hanging on his words:

“Harley, do you think it’s bad?”

He looked away again into blue vacancy and puffed gravely on his pipe before he answered:

“It’s pretty bad, Margaret…But don’t worry. We’ll see what happens.”

Then he was gone, leaving her alone there, bleakly staring at the pavement of the small, familiar street. Unseen motes of the familiar life swept round her, the pale light of the sun fell on her, and she remained there staring with gaunt face. How much time went by she did not know, but all at once——

“0 Margaret!”

At the lush voice, sugared with the honey of its owner’s sweetness, she turned, blindly smiling, and stiffly blurted out a word of greeting.

“Aren’t you just so proud of him? He always liked you better than anybody else! Aren’t you simply thrilled todeath?” The voice rose to a honeyed lilt, and in the pale light the face was now shaped into the doelike contours of a china doll. “I’ll declayah! I’m so thrilled! I know you must be walkin’on ayah! Why, I just cain’t wait! I’m justdyin' to read it! I know that you’re the proudest thing that evah lived!”

Margaret stammered out something through stiff, smiling lips, and then was left alone again, her big gaunt face strained into vacancy. She went about the business that had brought her to town. She went through the motions automatically. And all the while she was thinking:

“So, he’s written about us! That’s what it is!” Her mind rushed furiously on through a chaos of unresolved emotions. “Well, I’m sure I don’t know what it’s all about, but there’s one thing certain—my conscience is clear. If anyone thinks they’ve got anything on me, they’re very much mistaken…Now, if he wants to criticise me”—in her mind the word implied a derogatory appraisal of a person’s life and conduct—“why he can go right ahead. I’ve lived all my life in this town, and everybody knows—no matter what anybody says—that I’ve never done anything immoral.” By this word she meant solely and simply a deviation from the standards of sexual chastity. “Now I’m sure I don’t know what Harley meant by its being hard to take and people will talk, but I know I’ve got nothing to be ashamed about…”

Her mind was full of frantic questions. A hundred apprehensions, fears, and terrors swept through her. But through it all there were shafts of stubborn strength and loyalty:

“Whatever it’s about, I know there can’t be any harm in it. We’ve all done things we’re sorry for, but we’re not bad people, any of us. No one I know is really very bad. He couldn’t harm us if he wanted to. And,” she added, “he wouldn’t want to.”

To her brother, Randy, when he came home that night, she said:

“Well, we’re in for it!…I saw Harley McNabb on the street and he said the book is pretty bad…Now, I don’t know what he said about you—Ho! Ho! Ho!—but my conscience is clear!”

Randy followed her back to the kitchen and they talked about it long and earnestly while Margaret cooked supper. They were both puzzled and bewildered by what McNabb had said. Neither of them had yet read the book, so they searched their memories for all sorts of things that might be in it, but they couldn’t imagine what it was. Supper was late that night, and when Margaret brought it to the table it was burned.

Three weeks later, in New York, George sat in the back room of his dismal flat on Twelfth Street, reading his morning mail. He had always wanted letters. Now he had them. It seemed to him that all the letters he had been waiting for all his life, all the letters he had longed for, all the letters that had never come, had now descended in a flood.

He remembered all the years, all the weary and unnumbered days and hours of waiting, after he had first left home for college. He remembered that first year away from home, his freshman year, and how it seemed to him that he was always waiting for a letter that never came. He remembered how the students gathered for their mail twice a day, at noon and then again at night when they had finished dinner. He remembered the dingy little post office on the main street of the little college town, and the swarm of students shuffling in and out—the whole street dense with them, the dingy little post office packed with them, opening their boxes, taking out their mail, milling round the delivery window.

Everyone, it seemed, got letters except himself.

Here were boys packed in the corners, leaning against the walls, propped up against trees, squatted on steps and porch rails and the verandas of fraternity houses, walking oblivious across the village street—all immersed, all reading, all buried in their letters. Here was the boy who had only one girl and wanted no one but the girl he had, who had wormed himself away into a corner, just out of contact with that noisy and good-natured crowd, where he read slowly, carefully, word for word, the letter that she wrote him every day. Here was another lad, a sleek and handsome youth, one of the Casanovas of the campus, walking along and skimming the contents of a dozen scented epistles, shuffling through the pages and responding with a touch of complaisant satisfaction to the gibes of his fellows over his latest conquest. Here were boys reading letters from their friends, from boys in other colleges, from older brothers and from younger sisters, from fathers, mothers, and from favourite aunts and uncles. From all these people these boys received the tokens of friendship, kinship, fellowship, and love—the emotions that give a man his place, that secure him in the confident, brave knowledge of his home, that wall his soul about with comfort, and that keep him from the desolation of an utter nakedness, from the dreadful sense of his atomic nullity in the roofless openness of life.

It seemed to him that everyone had this, except himself.

And, later, he remembered his first years in the city, his years of wandering, his first years of living utterly alone. Here, too, even more than in his college days, it seemed to him that he was always waiting for a letter that never came. That was the time when he had eaten out his heart at night in the cell-like privacy of little rooms. That was the time when he had beaten his knuckles raw and bloody at the walls that hemmed him in. That was the time—and it was ten thousand times of longing, disappointment, bitter grief, and loneliness—when his unresting mind had written to himself the letters that never came. Letters from the noble, loyal, and gracious people he had never known. Letters from the heroic and great-hearted friends that he had never had. Letters from the faithful kinsmen, neighbours, schoolmates who had all forgotten him.

Well, he had them now—all of them—and he had not foreseen it.

He sat there in his room and read them, numb in the city’s roar. Two shafts of light sank through the windows to the floor. Outside, the cat crept trembling at his merciless stride along the ridges of the back-yard fence.

Anonymous, in pencil, on a sheet of ruled tablet paper:

“Well author old lady Flood went away to Florida yestiddy after a so-called litterary book arrived from a so-called author that she thought she knew. Oh God how can you have this crime upon your soal. I left your pore dere aunt Maggie lying on her back in bed white as a sheet where she will never rise again where you have put her with your murder pen. Your dere friend Margaret Shepperton who was always like a sister to you is ruined and disgraced for life you have made her out no better than a wanton woman. You have murdered and disgraced your friends never come back here you are the same as dead to all of us we never want to see your face again. I never believed in linch  law but if I saw a mob drag that monkeyfied karkus of yours across the Public Square I would not say a word. How can you sleep at night with this crime upon your soal. Destroy this vile and dirty book at once let no more copies be published the crime that you have done is worse than Cain.”

On a postcard, sealed in an envelope:

“We’ll kill you if you ever come back here. You know who.”

From an old friend:

"My dear boy,

"What is there to say? It has come, it is here, it has happened—and now I can only say, as that good woman who brought you up and now lies dead and buried on the hill would have said:’0 God! If I had only known!’For weeks I have waited for nothing else except the moment when your book should come and I should have it in my hands. Well, it has come now. And what is there to say?

“You have crucified your family in a way that would make the agony of Christ upon the Cross seem light in the comparison. You have laid waste the lives of your kinsmen, and of dozens of your friends, and to us who loved you like our own you have driven a dagger to the heart, and twisted it, and left it fixed there where it must always stay.”

From a sly and hearty fellow who thought he understood:

“…if I had known you were going to write this kind of book, I could have told you lots of things. Why didn’t you come to me? I know dirt about the people in this town you never dreamed of.”

Letters like this last one hurt him worst of all. They were the ones that made him most doubt his purpose and accomplishment. What did such people think he had been trying to write—nothing but an encyclopaedia of pornography, a kind of prurient excavation of every buried skeleton in town? He saw that his book had unreefed whole shoals of unsuspected bitterness and malice in the town and set evil tongues to wagging. The people he had drawn upon to make the characters in his book writhed like hooked fish on a line, and the others licked their lips to see them squirm.

Those who were the victims of all this unleashed malice now struck back, almost to a man, at the hapless author—at him whom they considered to be the sole cause of their woe. Day after day their letters came, and with a perverse satisfaction in his own suffering, a desire to take upon himself now all the searing shame that he had so naively and so unwittingly brought to others, he read and re-read every bitter word of every bitter letter, and his senses and his heart were numb.

They said at first that he was a monster against life, that he had fouled his own nest. Then they said he had turned against the South, his mother, and spat upon her and defiled her. Then they levelled against him the most withering charge they could think of, and said he was “not Southern”. Some of them even began to say that he was “not American”. This was really rather hard on him, George thought with a wry, grim humour, for if he was not American, he was not anything at all.

And during those nightmarish first weeks following the publication of his book, only two rays of warmth and comforting assurance came to him from anyone he knew.

One was a letter from Randy Shepperton. As a boy, and later as a student at college, Randy had possessed a spirit that always burned with the quick, pure flame of a Mercutio. And now, in spite of what life had done to him—the evidence of which George had seen in his troubled eyes and deeply furrowed face—his letter showed that he was still essentially the same old Randy. What he wrote was full of understanding about the book; he saw its purpose clearly, and he gave, George thought, a shrewd appraisal of its accomplishment and its weaknesses; and he ended with a generous burst of pride and honest pleasure in the thing itself. Not a word about personalities, not a breath of all the gossip in the town, not even a hint that he had recognised himself among the portraits George had drawn.

The other ray of comfort was of quite another kind. One day the telephone rang, and it was Nebraska Crane howling his friendship over the wire:

“Hi, there, Monkus! That you? How you makin’out, boy?”

“Oh, all right, I guess,” George answered, in a tone of resignation which he could not conceal even in the pleasure that he felt at hearing the hearty ring of the familiar voice.

“You sound sorta down in the mouth,” said Nebraska, full of immediate concern. “What’s the matter? Ain’t nothin’wrong with you, is there?”

“Oh, no. No. It’s nothing. Forget it.” Then, shaking off the mood that had been with him for days, he began to respond with something of the warmth he felt for his old friend. “God, I’m glad to hear from you, Bras! I can’t tell you how glad I am! How are you, Bras?”

“Oh, cain’t complain,” he shouted lustily. “I think maybe they’re gonna give me a contrack for one more year. Looks like it, anyways. If they do, we’ll be all set.”

“That’s swell, Bras! That’s wonderful!…And how is Myrtle?”

“Fine! Fine!…Say”—he howled—“she’s here now! She’s the one put me up to callin’you. I never woulda thought of it. You know me!…We been readin’all about you—about that book you wrote. Myrtle’ s been tellin’me about it. She’s cut out all the pieces from the papers…That sure went over big, didn’t it?”

“It’s doing pretty well, I suppose,” said George without enthusiasm. “It seems to be selling all right, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well, now, I knowed it!” said Nebraska. “Me an’Myrtle bought a copy…I ain’t read it yet,” he added apologetically.

“You don’t have to.”

“I’m goin to, I’m goin to,” he howled vigorously. “Just as soon as I git time.”

“You’re a damned liar!” George said good-naturedly. “You know you never will!”

“Why, I will!” Nebraska solemnly declared. “I’m just waitin’till I git a chance to settle down…Boy, you shore do write’em long, don’t you?”

“Yes, it is pretty long.”

“Longest darn book I ever seen!” Nebraska yelled enthusiastically. “Makes me tard just to tote it roun’!”

“Well, it made me tired to write it.”

“Dogged if I don’t believe you! I don’t see how you ever thought up all them words…But I’m gonna read it!…Some of the boys on the Club know about it already. Jeffertz was talkin’to me about it the other day.”

“Who?”

“Jeffertz—Matt Jeffertz, the ketcher.”

“Has he read it?”

“Naw, he ain’t read it yet, but his wife has. She’s a big book-reader an’she knows all about you. They knowed I knowed you, an’that’s how come he tells me—”

“Tells you what?” George broke in with a feeling of sudden panic.

“Why, that you got me in there!” he yelled. “Is that right!” George reddened and began to stammer:

“Well, Bras, you see——”

“Well, that’s what Matt’s wife said!” Nebraska shouted at the top of his lungs, without waiting for an answer. “Said I’m in there so’s anyone would know me!…What’d you say about me, Monk? You sure it’s me?”

“Well—you see, now, Bras—it was like this——”

“What’s eatin’on you, boy? It is me, ain’t it?…Well, what d’you know?” he yelled with evident amazement and delight. “Ole Bras right there in the book!” His voice grew low and more excited as, evidently turning to Myrtle, he said: “It’s me, all right!” Then, to George again: “Say, Monk”—solemnly—“you shore do make me feel mighty proud! That’s what I called you up to tell you.”

23. The Lion Hunters

In New York his book got a somewhat better reception than it’enjoyed back home. The author was unknown. Nobody had any advance reason to care about what he had written one way or another. Though this was not exactly an asset, at least it gave the book a chance to be considered on its merits.

Surprisingly enough, it got pretty good reviews in most of the leading newspapers and magazines. That is, they were the kind of reviews that his publisher called “good”. They said nice things about the book and made people want to buy it. George himself could have wished that some of the reviewing gentry, even some of those who hailed him as “a discovery” and studded their sentences with superlatives, had been a little more discriminating in what they said of him. Occasionally he could have asked for a little more insight into what he had been driving at. But after reading the letters from his former friends and neighbours he was in no mood to quarrel with anybody who felt disposed to speak him a soft and gentle word, and on the whole he had every reason to be well pleased with his press.

He read the notices avidly, feverishly, and sooner or later he must have seen them all, for his publisher showed him the clippings as they came in from every section of the country. He would take great bunches of them home to devour. When his eager eye ran upon a word of praise it was like magic to him, and he would stride about his room in a delirium of joy. When he read a savage, harsh, unfavourable review, he felt crushed: even though it came from some little rural paper in the South, his fingers would tremble, his face turn pale, and he would wad it up in his hand and curse it bitterly.

Whenever a notice of his work appeared in one of the best magazines or weekly journals, he could hardly bring himself to read it; neither could he go away from it and leave it unread. He would approach it as a man creeps stealthily to pick a snake up by the tail, his heart leaping at the sight of his name. He would scan the last line first, then with a rush of blood to his face he would plunge into it at once, devouring the whole of it as quickly as he could. And if he saw that it was going to be “good”, a feeling of such powerful joy and exultancy would well up in his throat that he would want to shout his triumph from the windows. If he saw that the verdict was going to be “thumbs down”, he would read on with agonised fascination, and his despair would be so great that he would feel he was done for, that he had been exposed to the world as a fool and a failure, and that he would never be able to write another line.

After the more important reviews appeared, his mail gradually took on a different complexion. Not that the flood of damning letters from home had ceased, but now, along with them, began to come messages of another kind, from utter strangers who had read his novel and liked it. The book was doing pretty well, it seemed.’It even appeared on some of the best-seller lists, and then things really began to happen. Soon his box was stuffed with fan mail, and the telephone jingled merrily all day long with invitations from wealthy and cultivated people who wanted him for lunch, for tea, for dinner, for theatre parties, for week-ends in the country—for anything at all if he would only come.

Was this Fame at last? It looked so, and in the first flush of his eager belief he almost forgot about Libya Hill and rushed headlong into the welcoming arms of people he had never seen before. He accepted invitations right and left, and they kept him pretty busy. And each time he went out it seemed to him that he was on the very point of capturing all the gold and magic he had ever dreamed of finding, and that now he was really going to take a place of honour among the great ones of the city, in a life more fortunate and good than any he had ever known. He went to each encounter with each new friend as though some wonderful and intoxicating happiness were impending for him.

But he never found it. For, in spite of all the years he had lived in New York, he was still a country boy, and he did not know about the lion hunters. They are a peculiar race of people who inhabit the upper jungles of Cosmopolis and subsist entirely on some rarefied and ambrosial ectoplasm that seems to emanate from the arts. They love art dearly—in fact, they dote on it—and they love the artists even more. So they spend their whole lives running after them, and their favourite sport is trapping literary lions. The more intrepid hunters go after nothing but the full-grown lions, who make the most splendid trophies for exhibition purposes, but others—especially the lady hunters—would rather bag a cub. A cub, once tamed and housebroken, makes a nice pet—much nicer than a lap dog—because there’s just no limit to the beguiling tricks a gentle hand can teach him.

For a few weeks George was quite the fair-haired boy among these wealthy and cultivated people.

One of his new-found friends told him about an aesthetic and high-minded millionaire who was panting with eagerness to meet him. From others came further confirmation of the fact.

“The man is mad about your work,” people would say to him. “He’s crazy to meet you. And you ought to go to see him, because a man like that might be of great help to you.”

They told George that this man had asked all kinds of questions about him, and had learned that he was very poor and had to work for a small salary as an instructor in the School for Utility Cultures. When the millionaire heard this, his great heart began to bleed for the young author immediately. It was intolerable, he said, that such a state of affairs should exist. America was the only country in the world where it would be permitted. Anywhere in Europe—yes, even in poor little Austria!—the artist would be subsidised, the ugly threat of poverty that hung over him would be removed, his best energies would be released to do his finest work—and, by God, he was going to see that this was done for George!

George had never expected anything like this to happen, and he could not see why such a thing should be done for any man. Nevertheless, when he thought of this great-hearted millionaire, he burned with eagerness to meet him and began to love him like a brother.

So a meeting was arranged, and George went to see him, and the man was very fine to him. The millionaire had George to his house for dinner several times and showed him off to all of his rich friends. And one lovely woman to whom the millionaire introduced the poor young author took him home with her that very night and granted him the highest favour in her keeping.

Then the millionaire had to go abroad on brief but urgent business. George went to the boat to see him off, and his friend shook him affectionately by the shoulder, called him by his first name, and told him that if there was anything he wanted, just to let him know by cable and he would see that it was done. He said he would be back within a month at most, and would be so busy that he wouldn’t have time to write, but he would get in touch with George again as soon as he returned. With this he wrung George by the hand and sailed away.

A month, six weeks, two months went by, and George heard nothing from the man. It was well into the new year before he saw him again, and then by accident.

A young lady had invited George to have lunch with her at an expensive speak-easy. As soon as they entered the place George saw his millionaire friend sitting alone at one of the tables. Immediately George uttered a cry of joy and started across the room to meet him with his hand outstretched, and in such precipitate haste that he fell sprawling across an intervening table and two chairs. When he picked himself up from the floor, the man had drawn back with an expression of surprise and perplexity on his face, but he unbent sufficiently to take the young man’s proffered hand and to say coolly, in an amused and tolerant voice:

“Ah—it’s our writer friend again? How are you?”

The young man’s crestfallen confusion and embarrassment were so evident that the rich man’s heart was quite touched. His distant manner thawed out instantly, and now nothing would do but that George should bring the young lady over to the millionaire’s table so that they could all have lunch together.

During the course of the meal the man became very friendly and attentive. It seemed he just couldn’t do enough for George. He kept helping him to various dishes and filling his glass with more wine. And whenever George turned to him he would find the man looking at him with an expression of such obvious sympathy and commiseration that finally he felt compelled to ask him what the trouble was.

“Ah,” he said, shaking his head with a doleful sigh, “I was mighty sorry when I read about it.”

“Read about what?”

“Why,” he said, “the prize.”

“What prize?”

“But didn’t you read about it in the paper? Didn’t you see what happened?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” said George, puzzled. “What did happen?”

“Why,” he said, “you didn’t get it.”

“Didn’t get what?”

“The prize!” he cried—“the prize!”—mentioning a literary prize that was awarded every year. “I thought you would be sure to get it, but”—he paused a moment, then went on sorrowfully—“they gave it to another man…You got mentioned…you were runner-up…but”—he shook his head gloomily—“you didn’t get it.”

So much for his gocd friend, the millionaire. George never saw him again after that. And yet, let no one say that he was ever bitter.

Then there was Dorothy.

Dorothy belonged to that fabulous and romantic upper crust of New York “Society” which sleeps by day and begins to come awake at sunset and never seems to have any existence at all outside of the better-known hot spots of the town. She had been expensively educated for a life of fashion, she had won a reputation in her set for being quite an intellectual because she had been known to read a book, and so, of course, when George Webber’s novel was listed as a best seller she bought it and left it lying around in prominent places in her apartment. Then she wrote the author a scented note, asking him to come and have a cocktail with her. He did, and at her urging he went back to see her again and again.

Dorothy was no longer as young as she had been, but she was well built, had kept her figure and her face, and was not a bad-looking wench. She had never married, and apparently felt she did not need to, for it was freely whispered about that she seldom slept alone. One heard that she had bestowed her favours not only upon all the gentlemen of her own set, but also upon such casual gallants as the milkmen on her family’s estate, stray taxi-drivers, writers of da-da, professional bicycle riders, wasteland poets, and plug-ugly bruisers with flat feet and celluloid collars. So George had expected their friendship to come quickly to its full flower, and he was quite surprised and disappointed when nothing happened.

His evenings with Dorothy turned out to be quiet and serious tête-à-têtes devoted to highly intellectual conversation. Dorothy remained as chaste as a nun, and George began to wonder whether she had not been grossly maligned by evil tongues. He found her intellectual and aesthetic interests rather on the dull side, and was several times on the point of giving her up in sheer boredom. But always she would pursue him, sending him notes and letters written in a microscopic hand on paper edged with red, and he would go back again, partly out of curiosity and a desire to find out what it was the woman was after.

He found out. Dorothy asked him to dine with her one night at a fashionable restaurant, and on this occasion she brought along her current sleeping companion, a young Cuban with patent-leather hair. George sat at the table between them. And while the Cuban gave his undivided attention to the food before him, Dorothy began to talk to George, and he learned to his chagrin that she had picked him out of all the world to be the victim of her only sacred passion.

“I love you, Jawge,” she leaned over and whispered loudly in her rather whiskified voice. “I love you—but mah love for you is pewer!” She looked at him with a soulful expression. “You, Jawge—I love you for your maind,” she rumbled on, “for your spirit! But Miguel! Miguel!”—here her eyes roved over the Cuban as he sat tucking the food away with both hands—“Miguel—I love him for his bawd-y! He has no maind, but he has a fa-ine bawd-y,” she whispered lustfully, “a fa-ine beaut-iful bawd-y—so slim—so boyish—so La-tin!”

She was silent for a moment, and when she went on it was in a tone of foreboding:

“I wantcha to come with us to-naight, Jawge!” she said abruptly. “I don’t know what is going to happen,” she said ominously, “and I wantcha nee-ah me.”

“But what is going to happen, Dorothy?”

“I don’t know,” she muttered. “I just don’t know. Anything might happen!…Why, last night I thought that he wasgone! We had a fight and he walked out on me! These La-tins are so proud, so sen-sitive! He caught me looking at another man, and he got up and left me flat!…If he left me I don’t know what I’d do, Jawge,” she panted. “I think I’d die! I think I’d kill myself!”

Her eye rested broodingly upon her lover, who at this moment was bending forward with bared teeth towards the tines of his uplifted fork on which a large and toothsome morsel of broiled chicken was impaled. Feeling their eyes upon him, he looked up with his fork poised in mid-air, smiled with satisfaction, then seized the bit of chicken in his jaws, took a drink to wash it down, and wiped his moist lips with a napkin. After that he elegantly lifted one hand to shield his mouth, inserted a finger-nail between his teeth, detached a fragment of his victuals, and daintily ejected it upon the floor, while his lady’s fond eye doted on him. Then he picked up the fork again and resumed his delightful gastronomic labours.

“I shouldn’t worry about it, Dorothy,” George said to her. “I don’t think he’s going to leave you for some time.”

“I should die!” she muttered. “I really think that it would kill me!…Jawge, you’ve got to come with us to-naight! I just wantcha to be nee-ah me! I feel so safe—so secure—when you’re around! You’re so sawlid, Jawge—socomfawtin'!” she said. “I wantcha to be theah to tawk to me—to hold mah hand and comfawt me—if anything should happen,” she said, at the same time putting her hand on his and squeezing it.

But George did not go with her that night, nor any night thereafter. This was the last he saw of Dorothy. But surely none can say that he was ever bitter.

Again, there was the rich and beautiful young widow whose husband had died just a short time before, and who mentioned this sad fact in the moving and poignantly understanding letter she wrote to George about his book. Naturally, he accepted her kind invitation to drop in for tea. And almost at once the lovely creature offered to make the supreme sacrifice, first beginning with an intimate conversation about poetry, then looking distressed and saying it was very hot in here and did he mind if she took off her dress, then taking it off, and everything else as well, until she stood there as God made her, then getting into bed and casting the mop of her flaming red hair about on the pillow, rolling her eyes in frenzied grief, and crying out in stricken tones: “0 Algernon! Algernon! Algernon!”—which was the name of her departed husband.

“0 Algernon!” she cried, rolling about in grief and shaking her great mop of flaming hair—“Algie, darling, I am doing it for you! Algie, come back to me! Algie, I love you so! My pain is more than I can bear! Algernon!—No, no, poor boy!” she cried, seizing George by the arm as he started to crawl out of bed, because, to tell the truth, he did not know whether she had gone mad or was playing some wicked joke on him. “Don’t go!” she whispered tenderly, clinging to his arm. “You just don’t understand! I want to be so good to you—but everything I do or think or feel is Algernon, Algernon, Algernon!”

She explained that her heart was buried in her husband’s grave, that she was really “a dead woman” (she had already told him she was a great reader of psychologies), and that the act of love was just an act of devotion to dear old Algie, an effort to be with him again and to be “a part of all this beauty.”

It was very fine and high and rare, and surely no one will think that George would sneer at a beautiful emotion, although it was too fine for him to understand. Therefore he went away, and never saw this lovely and sorrowful widow any more. He knew he was not fine enough. And yet, not for a moment should you think that he was ever bitter.

Finally, there was another girl who came into George Webber’s life during this period of his brief glory, and her he understood. She was a beautiful and brave young woman, country-bred, and she had a good job, and a little apartment from which you could see the East River, the bridges, and all the busy traffic of the tugs and barges. She was not too rare and high for him, although she liked to take a part in serious conversations, to know worth-while people with liberal minds, and to keep up her interest in new schools and modern methods for the children. George became quite fond of her, and would stay all night and go away at daybreak when the streets were empty, and the great buildings went soaring up haggardly, incredibly, as if he were the first man to discover them, in the pale, pure, silent light of dawn.

He loved her well; and one night, after a long silence, she put her arms round him, drew him down beside her, and kissed him, whispering:

“Will you do something for me if I ask you to?”

“Darling, anything!” he said. “Anything you ask me, if I can!” She held him pressed against her for a moment in the dark and living silence.

“I want you to use your influence to get me into the Cosmopolis Club,” she whispered passionately——

And then dawn came, and the stars fell.

This was the last he saw of the great world of art, of fashion, and of letters.

And if it seems to anyone a shameful thing that I have written thus of shameful things and shameful people, then I am sorry for it. My only object is to set down here the truthful record of George Webber’s life, and he, I feel quite sure, would be the last person in the world to wish me to suppress any chapter of it. So I do not think that I have written shamefully.

The only shame George Webber felt was that at one time in his life, for however short a period, he broke bread and sat at the same table with any man when the living warmth of friendship was not there; or that he ever traded upon the toil of his brain and the blood of his heart to get the body of a scented whore that might have been better got in a brothel for some greasy coins. This was the only shame he felt. And this shame was so great in him that he wondered if all his life thereafter would be long enough to wash out of his brain and blood the last pollution of its loathsome taint.

And yet, he would not have it thought that he was bitter.

24. Man-Creating and Man-Alive

It must be abundantly clear by now that George Webber was never bitter. What cause had he for bitterness? When he fled from the lion hunters he could always go back to the loneliness of his dismal two-room flat in Twelfth Street, and that is what he did. Also, he still had the letters from his friends in Libya Hill. They had not forgotten him. For four months and more after the publication of his hook they continued to write him, and all of them took pains to let him know exactly what place he held in their affections.

Throughout this time George heard regularly from Randy Shepperton. Randy was the only one that George had left to talk to, so George, in answering Randy, unburdened himself of everything he t bought and felt. Everything, that is, except upon a single topic—the rancour of his fellow-townsmen against the author who had exposed them naked to the world. Neither of the friends had ever mentioned it. Randy had set the pattern for evasion in his first letter, feeling that it was better to ignore the ugly gossip altogether and to let it die down and be forgotten. As for George, he had been too overwhelmed by it, too sunk and engulfed in it, to be able to speak of it at first. So they had chiefly confined themselves to the book itself, exchanging their thoughts and afterthoughts about it, with comments on what the various critics had said and left unsaid.

But by early March of the new year the flow of damning mail was past its flood and was thinning to a trickle, and one day Randy received from George the letter that he feared would have to come:

“I have spent most of my time this past week,” George wrote “reading and re-reading all the letters that my erstwhile friends and neighbours have written me since the book came out. And now that the balloting is almost over and most of the vote is in, the result is startling and a little confusing. I have been variously compared to Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, and Caesar’s Brutus. I have been likened to the bird that fouls its own nest, to a viper that an innocent populace had long nurtured in its bosom, to a carrion crow preying upon the blood and bones of his relatives and friends, and to an unnatural ghoul to whom nothing is sacred, not even the tombs of the honoured dead. I have been called a vulture, a skunk, a hog, deliberately and lustfully wallowing in the mire, a defiler of pure womanhood, a rattlesnake, a jackass, an alley-cat, and a baboon. Although my imagination has been strained trying to conceive of a creature who combined in himself all of these interesting traits—it would be worth any novelist’s time to meet such a chap!—there have been moments when I have felt that maybe my accusers are right…”

Behind this semblance of facetiousness, Randy could see that he was sincerely disturbed, and, knowing the capacity of George’s soul for self-torture, he could pretty well imagine how deep and sore the extent of his full suffering might be. He revealed it almost immediately:

"Great God! What is it I have done? Sometimes I am overwhelmed by a sense of horrible and irrevocable guilt! Never before have I realised as I have this past week how terrible and great may be the distance between the Artist and the Man.

"As the artist, I can survey my work with a clear conscience. I have the regrets and dissatisfactions that every writer ought to have: the book should have been better, it failed to measure up to what I wanted for it. But I am not ashamed of it. I feel that I wrote it as I did because of an inner necessity, that I had to do it, and that by doing it I was loyal to the only thing in me which is worth anything.

"So speaks Man-Creating. Then, instantly, it all changes, and from Man-Creating I become simply Man-Alive—a member of society, a friend and neighbour, a son and brother of the human race. And when I look at what I have done from this point of view, suddenly I feel lower than a dog. I see all the pain and anguish I have caused to people that I know, and I wonder how I could have done it, and how there could possibly be any justification for it—yes, even if what I wrote had been as great as Lear, as eloquent as Hamlet.

"Believe me—incredible as it may sound—when I tell you that during these weeks I have even derived a kind of grotesque and horrible pleasure from reading those letters which simply abused, cursed, or threatened me. There is, I found, a bitter relief in having someone curse me with every foul name he can think of or invent, or tell me he will put a bullet through my brain if I ever set foot in the streets of Libya Hill again. At any rate, I feel that the poor devil got some satisfaction out of writing it.

"But the letters that drive the blade into my heart and twist it round are those which neither curse nor threaten—the letters written by stunned and stricken people who never did me any wrong, whose whole feeling towards me was one of kindly good will and belief, who did not know me as I am, and who write me now straight out of the suffering heart of man, with their spirits quivering, stripped, whipped by naked shame, to ask me over and over again in their bewilderment that terrible and insistent question:’Why did you do it? Why? Why? Why?’

"And as I read their letters I no longer know why. I can’t answer them. As Man-Creating, I thought I knew, and thought, too, that the answer was all-sufficient. I wrote about them with blunt directness, trying to put in every relevant detail and circumstance, and I did it because I thought it would be cowardly not to write that way, false to withhold or modify. I thought that the Thing Itself was its own and valid reason for being.

"But now that it is done, I am no longer sure of anything. I am troubled by the most maddening doubts and impossible regrets. I have moments when I feel that I would give my life if I could un-write my book,  un-print its pages. For what has it accomplished, apparently, except to ruin my relatives, my friends, and everyone in town whose life was ever linked with mine? And what is there for me to salvage out of all this wreckage?

"’The integrity of the artist,’you may say.

"Ah, yes—if I could only soothe my conscience with that solacement! For what integrity is there that is not tainted with human frailty? If only I could tell myself that every word and phrase and incident in the book had been created at the top of my bent and with the impartial judgment of unrancorous detachment! But I know it is not true. So many words come back to me, so many whip-lash phrases, that must have been written in a spirit that had nothing to do with art or my integrity. We are such stuff as dust is made of, and where we fail—we fail! Is there, then, no such thing as a pure spirit in creation?

"In all the whole wretched experience there is also a grim and horrible humour. It is insanely comical to find in almost all these letters that I am being cursed for doing things I did not do and for saying things I did not say. It is even more ludicrous to hear myself grudgingly praised for having the one thing that I have not got. Few of these letters—even those which threaten hanging, and those which deny me the remotest scrap of talent (except a genius for obscenity)—fail to commend me for what their writers call’my memory’. Some of them accuse me of sneaking round as a little boy of eight with my pockets stuffed with notebooks, my ears fairly sprouting from my head and my eyes popping out, in my effort to spy upon and snatch up every word and act and phrase among my virtuous and unsuspecting fellow-townsmen.

"’It’s the dirtiest book I ever read,’one citizen cogently remarks,’but I’ll have to give you credit for one thing—you’ve got a wonderful memory.’

“And that is just exactly what I have not got. I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once. This thing they call my memory, this thing they think they can themselves remember, is nothing that they ever saw. It is rather something that I saw after looking at the thing a thousand times, and this is what they think they can remember.”

Randy paused in his reading of the letter, for he suddenly realised that what George said was literally true. In the weeks since the book was published, he himself had seen it proved over and over again.

He knew that there was scarcely a detail in George’s book that was precisely true to fact, that there was hardly a page in which everything had not been transmuted and transformed by the combining powers of George’s imagination; yet readers got from it such an instant sense of reality that many of them were willing to swear that the thing described had been not only “drawn from life”, but was the actual and recorded fact. And that was precisely what had made the outcry and denunciation so furious.

But not only that. It was funny enough to hear people talking and arguing with each other out of a savage conviction that scenes and incidents in the book were literally true because they may have had some basis in remembered fact. It was even more grotesque to hear them testify, as some of them now did, that they had been witnesses to events which he knew to be utter fabrications of the author’s imagination.

“Why,” they cried, when final proof of anything was wanted, “he’s got it all in! He’s written it all down, just the way it happened! Nothing’s changed a bit! Look at the Square!”

They always came back to the Square, for the Square had occupied a prominent place in Home to Our Mountains. George had pictured it with such intensity of vision that almost every brick and windowpane and cobblestone became imprinted on the reader’s mind. But what was this Square? Was it the town Square of Libya Hill? Everybody said it was. Hadn’t the local newspaper set it down in black and white that “our native chronicler has described the Square with a photographic eye”? Then people had read the book for themselves and had agreed.

So it was useless to argue with them—useless to point out to them how Webber’s Square differed from their own, unless to mention a hundred items of variation. They had been pitiful in their anger when t hey first discovered that art had imitated life; now they were ludicrous in their ignorance that life was also imitating art.

With a smile and a shake of the head, Randy turned back to the letter:

“In God’s name, what have I done?” George concluded. "Have I really acted according to some inner truth and real necessity, or did my unhappy mother conceive and give birth to a perverse monster who has defiled the dead and betrayed his family, kinsmen, neighbours, and the human race? What should I have done? What ought I to do now? If there is any help or answer in you, for Christ’s sake let me have it. I feel like a dead leaf in a hurricane. I don’t know where to turn. You alone can help me. Stay with me—write me—tell me what you think.

"Yours ever,

“GEORGE.”

George’s suffering had been so palpable in every sentence of his letter that Randy had winced in reading it. He had felt the naked anguish of his friend’s raw wound almost as if it had been his own. But he knew that neither he nor any other man could give the help answer that George sought. He would have to find it somehow in himself. That was the only way he had ever been able to learn anything.

So when Randy drafted his reply he deliberately made his letter as casual as he could. He did not want to let it seem that he attached too much importance to the town’s reaction. He said that he did not know what he would do if he were George, since he was not a writer, but that he had always supposed a writer had to write about the life he knew. To cheer George up, he added that the people of Libya Hill reminded him of children who had not yet been told the facts of life. They still believed, apparently, in the stork. Only people who knew nothing about the world’s literature could be surprised or shocked to learn where every good book came from.

And then, in a kind of mild parenthesis, he said that Tim Wagner, the town’s most celebrated souse, noted for his wit in his rare intervals of sobriety, had been a warm supporter of the book from the beginning, but had made one reservation: “Why, hell! If George wants to write about a horse-thief, that’s all right. Only the next time I hope he don’t give his street address. And there ain’t no use in throwing in his telephone number, too.”

Randy knew this would amuse George, and it did. In fact, George told him later that it was the most sound and valuable critical advice that he had ever had.

Randy ended his letter by assuring George that even if he was a writer, he still considered him a member of the human race. And he added, in what he hoped would be a comforting postscript, that there were other angry mutterings abroad. He had heard a rumour, whispered by one of the town’s leading business men with a great air of hush-hush and please-don’t-breathe-a-word-of-this-to-anyone, that Mr. Jarvis Riggs, the president of Libya Hill’s largest bank and past hero of infallibilities, was tottering on the brink of ruin.

“So you see,” Randy concluded, “if that godly gentleman is capable of imperfection, there may still be hope of pardon even in creatures as vile as you.”

25. The Catastrophe

A day or two after receiving Randy’s reply, George was reading the New York Times one morning when his eye was caught by a small news item on an inside page. It occupied only a scant two inches or so at the bottom of a column, but the Libya Hill date line leaped out at him:

BANK FAILS IN SOUTH

LIBYA HILL, 0. C., Mar. 12—The Citizens Trust Company of this city failed to open its doors for business this morning, and throughout the day, as news of its closing spread, conditions of near-panic mounted steadily here and in all the surrounding region. The bank was one of the largest in western Old Catawba and for years had been generally regarded as a model of conservative management and financial strength. The cause of its failure is not yet known. It is feared that the losses of the people of this community may be extensive.

The alarm occasioned by the closing of the bank was heightened later in the day by the discovery of the sudden and rather mysterious death of Mayor Baxter Kennedy. His body was found with a bullet through his head, and all the available evidence seems to point to suicide. Mayor Kennedy was a man of exceptionally genial and cheerful disposition, and is said to have had no enemies.

Whether there is any connection between the two events which have so profoundly disturbed the accustomed calm of this mountain district is not known, although their close coincidence has given rise to much excited conjecture.

“So,” thought George, laying down the paper with a stunned and thoughtful air, “it has come at last!…What was it that Judge Rumford Bland had said to them?”

The whole scene in the Pullman wash-room came back to him. He saw again the stark and speechless terror in the faces of Libya Hill’s leaders and rulers as the frail but terrible old blind man suddenly confronted them and held them with his sightless eyes and openly accused them of ruining the town. As George remembered this and sat there thinking about the news he had just read, he felt quite sure there must be some direct relation between the failure of the bank and the Mayor’s suicide.

---

There was, indeed. Things had been building up to this double climax for a long time.

Jarvis Riggs, the banker, had come from a poor but thoroughly respectable family in the town. When he was fifteen his father died and he had to quit school and go to work to support his mother. He held a succession of small jobs until, at eighteen, he was offered a modest but steady position in the Merchants National Bank.

He was a bright young fellow and a “hustler”, and step by step he worked his way up until he became a teller. Mark Joyner kept a deposit at the Merchants National and used to come home and talk about Jarvis Riggs. In those days he had none of the brittle manner and pompous assurance that were to characterise him later, after he had risen to greatness. His hair, which was afterwards to turn a dead and lifeless sandy colour, had glints of gold in it then, his cheeks were full and rosy, he had a bright and smiling face, and it was always briskly and cheerfully—“Good morning, Mr. Joyner!” or “Good morning, Mr. Shepperton!”—when a customer came in. He was friendly, helpful, courteous, eager to please, and withal businesslike and knowing. He also dressed neatly and was known to be supporting his mother. All these things made people like him and respect him. They wanted to see him succeed. For Jarvis Riggs was a living vindication of an American legend—that of the poor boy who profits from the hardships of his early life and “makes good”. People would nod knowingly to one another and say of him:

“That young man has his feet on the ground.”

“Yes,” they would say, “he’s going somewhere.”

So when, along about 1912, the word began to go round that a small group of conservative business men were talking of starting a new bank, and that Jarvis Riggs was going to be its cashier, the feeling was most favourable. The backers explained that they were not going to compete with the established banks. It was simply their feeling that a growing town like Libya Hill, with its steady increase in population and in its business interests, could use another bank. And the new bank, one gathered, was to be conducted according to the most eminently approved principles of sound finance. But it was to be a progressive bank, too, forward-looking bank, mindful of the future, the great, golden, magnificent future that Libya Hill was sure to have—that it was even heresy to doubt. In this way it was also to be a young man’s bank. And this was where Jarvis Riggs came in.

It is not too much to say that the greatest asset the new enterprise had from the beginning was Jarvis Riggs. He had played his cards well. He had offended no one, he had made no enemies, he had always remained modest, friendly, and yet impersonal, as if not wishing to intrude himself too much on the attention of men who stood for substance and authority in the town’s life. The general opinion was that he knew what he was doing. He had learned about life in the highly-thought-of “university of hard knocks”, he had learned business and banking in “the hard school of experience”, so everybody felt that if Jarvis Riggs was going to be cashier of the new bank, then the new bank was pretty sure to be all right.

Jarvis himself went around town and sold stock in the bank. He had no difficulty at all. He made it quite plain that he did not think anyone was going to make a fortune. He simply sold the stock as a safe and sound investment, and that was how everybody felt about it. The bank was modestly capitalised at $25, 000, and there were 250 shares at $100 each. The sponsors, including Jarvis, took 100 shares between them, and the remaining 150 shares were divided among “a selected group of leading business men”. As Jarvis said, the bank was really “a community project whose first and only purpose is to serve the community”, so no one was allowed to acquire too large an interest.

This was the way the Citizens Trust Company got started. And in no time at all, it seemed, Jarvis Riggs was advanced from cashier to vice-president, and then to president. The poor boy had come into his own.

In its early years the bank prospered modestly and conservatively. Its growth was steady but not spectacular. After the United States entered the war, it got its share of the nation’s prosperity. But after the war, in 1921, there was a temporary lull, a period of “adjustment”. Then the 1920’s began in earnest.

The only way to explain what happened then is to say that there was “a feeling in the air”. Everybody seemed to sense a prospect of quick and easy money. There was thrilling and rapid expansion in all directions, and it seemed that there were possibilities of wealth, luxury, and economic power hitherto undreamed of just lying around waiting for anyone who was bold enough to seize them.

Jarvis Riggs was no more insensible to these beckoning opportunities than the next man. The time had come, he decided, to step out and show the world what he could do. The Citizens Trust began to advertise itself as “the fastest-growing bank in the state”. But it did not advertise what it was growing on.

That was the time when the political and business clique which dominated the destinies of the town, and which had put amiable Baxter Kennedy in the Mayor’s office as its “front”, began to focus its activities round the bank. The town was burgeoning rapidly and pushing out into the wilderness, people were confident of a golden future, no one gave a second thought to the reckless increase in public borrowing. Bond issues involving staggering sums were being constantly “floated” until the credit structure of the town was built up into a teetering inverted pyramid and the citizens of Libya Hill no longer owned the streets they walked on. The proceeds of these enormous borrowings were deposited with the bank. The bank, for its part, then returned these deposits to the politicians, or to their business friends, supporters, allies, and adherents—in the form of tremendous loans, made upon the most flimsy and tenuous security, for purposes of private and personal speculation. In this way “The Ring”, as it was called, which had begun as an inner circle of a few ambitious men, became in time a vast and complex web that wove through the entire social structure of the town and involved the lives of thousands of people. And all of it now centred in the bank.

But the weaving of this complicated web of frenzied finance and speculation and special favours to “The Ring” could not go on for ever, though there were many who thought it could. There had to come a time when the internal strains and stresses became too great to sustain the load, a time when there would be ominous preliminary tremors to give warning of the crash that was to come. Just when this time arrived is pretty hard to say. One can observe a soldier moving forward in a battle and see him spin and tumble, and know the moment he is hit. But one cannot observe so exactly the moment when a man has been shot down by life.

So it was with the bank and with Jarvis Riggs. All that one can be sure of is that their moment came. And it came long before the mighty roar of tumbling stocks in Wall Street echoed throughout the nation. That event, which had its repercussions in Libya Hill as elsewhere, was not the prime cause of anything. What happened in Wall Street was only the initial explosion which in the course of the next few years was to set off a train of lesser explosions all over the land—explosions which at last revealed beyond all further doubting and denial the hidden pockets of lethal gases which a false, vicious, and putrescent scheme of things had released beneath the surface of American life.

Long before the explosion came that was to blow him sky-high, and the whole town with him, Jarvis Riggs had felt the tremors in the thing he had created, and he knew he was a doomed and ruined man. Before long others knew it, too, and knew that they were ruined with him. But they would not let themselves believe it. They did not dare. Instead, they sought to exorcise the thing they feared by pretending it wasn’t there. Their speculations only grew madder, fiercer.

And then, somehow, the cheerful, easy-going Mayor found out what some of those round him must have known for months. That was in the spring of 1928, two years before the failure of the bank. At that time he went to Jarvis Riggs and told him what he knew, and then demanded to withdraw the city’s funds. The banker looked the frightened Mayor in the eye and laughed at him.

“What are you afraid of, Baxter?” he said. “Are you showing the white feather now that the pinch is on? You say you are going to withdraw the deposits of the city? All right—withdraw them. But I warn you, if you do the bank is ruined. It will have to close its doors to-morrow. And if it closes its doors, where is your town? Your precious town is also ruined.”

The Mayor looked at the banker with a white face and stricken eyes. Jarvis Riggs leaned forward and his tones became more persuasive:

“Pull out your money if you like, and wreck your town. But why not play along with us, Baxter? We’re going to see this thing through.” He was smiling now, and wearing his most winning manner. “We’re in a temporary depression—yes. But six months from now we’ll be out of the woods. I know we will. We’re coming back stronger than ever. You can’t sell Libya Hill short,” he said, using a phrase that was in great vogue just then. “We’ve not begun to see the progress we’re going to make. But the salvation and future of this town rests in your hands. So make up your mind about it. What are you going to do?”

The Mayor made up his mind. Unhappy man.

Things drifted along. Time passed. The sands were running low.

By the autumn of 1929 there began to be a vague rumour going about that all was not well at the Citizens Trust. George Webber had heard it himself when he went home in September. But it was a nebulous thing, and as often as not the person who whispered it fearfully would catch himself and say:

“Oh, pshaw! There’s nothing in it. There couldn’t be! You know how people talk.”

But the rumour persisted through the winter, and by early March it had become a disturbing and sinister contagion. No one could say where it came from. It seemed to be distilled like a poison out of the mind and heart and spirit of the whole town.

On the surface there was nothing to account for it. The Citizens Trust maintained its usual appearance of solid substance, businesslike efficiency, and Greek-templed sanctity. Its broad plate-glass windows opening out upon the Square let in a flood of light, and the whole atmosphere was one of utter clarity. The very breadth of those windows seemed to proclaim to the world the complete openness and integrity of the bank’s purpose. They seemed to say:

“Here is the bank, and here are all the people in the bank, and all the people in the bank are openly at work. Look, citizens, and see for yourselves. You see there is nothing hidden here. The bank is Libya, and Libya is the bank.”

It was all so open that one did not have to go inside to know what was going on. One could stand on the pavement outside and look in and see everything. To the right were the tellers’cages, and to the left there was a railed-off space in which the officers sat at their sumptuous mahogany flat-topped desks. At the largest of these desks, just inside the low enclosure, sat Jarvis Riggs himself. There he sat, talking importantly and pompously, as though laying down the law, to one of his customers. There he sat, briskly reading through the pile of papers on his desk. There he sat, pausing in his work now and then to look up at the ceiling in deep thought, or to lean back in his swivel-chair and gently rock in meditation.

It was all just as it had always been.

Then it happened.

March 12, 1930 was a day that will be long remembered in the annals of Libya Hill. The double tragedy set the stage as nothing else could have done for the macabre weeks to follow.

If all the fire-bells in town had suddenly begun to ring out their alarm at nine o’clock that morning, the news could not have spread more rapidly that the Citizens Trust Company was closed. Word of it leapt from mouth to mouth. And almost instantly, from every direction, white-faced men and women came running towards the Square. There were housewives with their aprons on, their hands still dripping dishwater; workmen and mechanics with their warm tools in their hands; hatless business men and clerks; young mothers carrying babies in their arms. Everyone in town, it seemed, had dropped whatever he was doing and rushed out in the streets the moment the news had reached him.

The Square itself was soon a seething mass of frenzied people. Frantically, over and over, they asked each other the same questions: Was it really true? How had it happened? How bad was it?

In front of the bank itself the crowd was quieter, more stunned. To this spot, sooner or later, they all came, drawn by a common desperate hope that they would yet be able to see with their own eyes that it was not so. Like a sluggish current within that seething mass the queue moved slowly past, and as the people saw those locked and darkened doors they knew that all hope was gone. Some just stared with stricken faces, some of the women moaned and wailed, from the eyes of strong men silent tears coursed down, and from the mouths of others came the rumble of angry mutterings.

For their ruin had caught up with them. Many of the people in that throng had lost their life savings. But it was not only the bank’s depositors who were ruined. Everyone now knew that their boom was over. They knew that the closing of the bank had frozen all their speculations just as they were, beyond the possibility of extricating themselves. Yesterday they could count their paper riches by ten thousands and by millions; to-day they owned nothing, their wealth had vanished, and they were left saddled with debts that they could never pay.

And they did not yet know that their city government was bankrupt, too—that six million dollars of public money had been lost behind those closed and silent doors.

It was a little before noon on that ill-omened day that Mayor Kennedy was found dead. And, just to put the final touch of gruesome irony upon the whole event, a blind man found him.

Judge Rumford Bland testified at the inquest that he left his front office, upstairs in the ramshackle building that he owned there on the Square, and went out in the hall, heading in the direction of the toilet, where he proposed to perform an essential function of nature. It was dark out there, he said with his ghostly smile, and the floors creaked, but this didn’t matter to him—he knew the way. He said he couldn’t have lost his way even if he had wanted to. At the end of the hall he could hear a punctual drip of water, dropping with its slow, incessant monotone; and besides, there was the pervasive smell of the tin urinal—all he had to do was to follow his nose.

He arrived in darkness and pushed open the door, and suddenly his foot touched something. He leaned over, his white, thin fingers groped down, and all at once they were plunged—wet, warm, sticky reeking—into the foundering mass of what just five minutes before had been the face and brains of a living man.

—No, he hadn’t heard the shot—there was all that infernal commotion out in the Square.

—No, he had no idea how he had got there—walked it, he supposed—the City Hall was only twenty yards away.

—No, he couldn’t say why His Honour should have picked that spot to blow his brains out—there was no accounting for tastes—but if a man wanted to do it, that was probably as good a place as any.

So it was that weak, easy-going, procrastinating, good-natured Baxter Kennedy, Mayor of Libya Hill, was found—all that was left of him—in darkness, by an evil old blind man.

In the days and weeks that followed the closing of the bank, Libya Hill presented a tragic spectacle the like of which had probably never before been seen in America. But it was a spectacle that was to be repeated over and over again, with local variations, in many another town and city within the next few years.

The ruin of Libya Hill was much more than the ruin of the bank and the breakdown of the economic and financial order. True, when the bank failed, all that vast and complicated scheme of things which had been built upon it, the ramifications of which extended into every element of the community’s life, toppled and crashed. But the closing of the bank was only like the action of a rip-cord which, once jerked, brought the whole thing down, and in doing so laid bare the deeper and more corrosive ruin within. And this deeper ruin—the essence of the catastrophe—was the ruin of the human conscience.

Here was a town of fifty thousand people who had so abdicated every principle of personal and communal rectitude, to say nothing of common sense and decency, that when the blow fell they had no inner resources with which to meet it. The town almost literally blew its brains out. Forty people shot themselves within ten days, and others did so later. And, as so often happens, many of those who destroyed themselves were among the least guilty of the lot. The rest—and this was the most shocking part of it—suddenly realising their devastating guilt to such a degree that they could not face the results of it, now turned like a pack of howling dogs to rend each other. Cries of vengeance rose up from all their throats, and they howled for the blood of Jarvis Riggs. But these cries proceeded not so much from a conviction of wounded justice and deceived innocence as from their opposites. It was the sublime, ironic, and irrevocable justice of what had happened to them, and their knowledge that they alone had been responsible for it, that maddened them. From this arose their sense of outrage and their cries of vengeance.

What happened in Libya Hill and elsewhere has been described in the learned tomes of the overnight economists as a breakdown of “the system, the capitalist system”. Yes, it was that. But it was also much more than that. In Libya Hill it was the total disintegration of what, in so many different ways, the lives of all these people had come to be. It went much deeper than the mere obliteration of bank accounts, the extinction of paper profits, and the loss of property. It was the ruin of men who found out, as soon as these symbols of their outward success had been destroyed, that they had nothing left—no inner equivalent from which they might now draw new strength. It was the ruin of men who, discovering not only that their values were false but that they had never had any substance whatsoever, now saw at last the emptiness and hollowness of their lives. Therefore they killed themselves; and those who did not die by their own hands died by the knowledge that they were already dead.

How can one account for such a complete drying up of all the spiritual sources in the life of a people? When one observes a youth of eighteen on a city street and sees the calloused scar that has become his life, and remembers the same youth as he was ten years before when he was a child of eight, one knows what has happened though the cause be hidden. One knows that there came a time when life stopped growing for that youth and the scar began; and one feels that if he could only find the reason and the cure, he would know what revolutions are.

In Libya Hill there must have been a time when life stopped growing and the scar began. But the learned economists of “the system” do not bother about this. For them, it belongs to the realm of the metaphysical—they are impatient of it, they will not trouble with it, they want to confine the truth within their little picket fence of facts. But they cannot. It is not enough to talk about the subtle complications of the credit structure, the intrigues of politics and business, the floating of bond issues, the dangers of inflation, speculation, and unsound prices, or the rise and decline of banks. When all these facts are added up, they still don’t give the answer. For there is something more to say.

So with Libya Hill:

One does not know at just what moment it began, but one suspects that it began at some time long past in the lone, still watches of the night, when all the people lay waiting in their beds in darkness. Waiting for what? They did not know. They only hoped that it would happen—some thrilling and impossible fulfilment, some glorious enrichment and release of their pent lives, some ultimate escape from their own tedium.

But it did not come.

Meanwhile, the stiff boughs creaked in the cold bleakness of the corner lights, and the whole town waited, imprisoned in its tedium.

And sometimes, in furtive hallways, doors opened and closed, there was a padding of swift, naked feet, the stealthy rattling of brass casters, and behind old battered shades, upon the edge of Nigger-town, the dull and fetid quickenings of lust.

Sometimes, in grimy stews of night’s asylumage, an oath, a blow, a fight.

Sometimes, through the still air, a shot, the letting of nocturnal blood.

And always, through broken winds, the sounds of shifting engines in the station yards, far off, along the river’s edge—and suddenly the thunder of great wheels, the tolling of the bell, the loneliness of the whistle cry wailed back, receding towards the North, and towards the hope, the promise, and the memory of the world unfound.

Meanwhile, the boughs creaked bleakly in stiff light, ten thousand men were waiting in the darkness, far off a dog howled, and the Court-House bell struck three.

No answer? Impossible?…Then let those—if such there be—who have not waited in the darkness, find answers of their own.

But if speech could frame what spirit utters, if tongue could tell what the lone heart knows, there would be answers somewhat other than those which are shaped by the lean pickets of rusty facts. There would be answers of men waiting, who have not spoken yet.

Below the starred immensity of mountain night old Rumford Bland, he that is called “The Judge”, strokes his sunken jaws reflectively as he stands at the darkened window of his front office and looks out with sightless eyes upon the ruined town. It is cool and sweet to-night, the myriad promises of life are lyric in the air. Gem-strewn in viewless linkage on the hills the lights make a bracelet for the town. The blind man knows that they are there, although he cannot see them. He strokes his sunken jaws reflectively and smiles his ghostly smile.

It is so cool and sweet to-night, and spring has come. There never was a year like this, they say, for dogwood in the hills. There are so many thrilling, secret things upon the air to-night—a burst of laughter, and young voices, faint, half-broken, and the music of a dance—how could one know that when the blind man smiles and stroke’s his sunken jaws reflectively, he is looking out upon a ruined town?

The new Court-House and City Hall are very splendid in the dark to-night. But he has never seen them—they were built since he went blind. Their fronts are bathed, so people say, in steady, secret light just like the nation’s dome at Washington. The blind man strokes his sunken jaws reflectively. Well, they should be splendid—they cost enough.

Beneath the starred immensity of mountain night there is something stirring in the air, a rustling of young leaves. And round the grass roots there is something stirring in the earth to-night. And below the grass roots and the sod, below the dew-wet pollen of young flowers, there is something alive and stirring. The blind man strokes his sunken jaws reflectively. Aye, there below, where the eternal worm keeps vigil, there is something stirring in the earth. Down, down below, where the worm incessant through the ruined house makes stir.

What lies there stir-less in the earth to-night, down where the worm keeps vigil?

The blind man smiles his ghostly smile. In his eternal vigil the worm stirs, but many men are rotting in their graves to-night, and sixty-four have bullet fractures in their skulls. Ten thousand more are lying in their beds to-night, living as shells live. They, too, are dead, though yet unburied. They have been dead so long they can’t remember how it was to live. And many weary nights must pass before they can join the buried dead, down where the worm keeps vigil.

Meanwhile, the everlasting worm keeps vigil, and the blind man strokes his sunken jaws, and slowly now he shifts his sightless gaze and turns his back upon the ruined town.

26. The Wounded Faun

Ten days after the failure of the bank in Libya Hill, Randy Shepperton arrived in New York. He had made up his mind suddenly, without letting George know, and the motives that brought him were mixed. For one thing, he wanted to talk to George and see if he couldn’t help to get him straightened out. His letters had been so desperate that Randy was beginning to be worried about him. Then, too, Randy felt he just had to get away from Libya Hill for a few days and out of that atmosphere of doom and ruin and death. And he was free now, there was nothing to keep him from coming, so he came.

He arrived early in the morning, a little after eight o’clock, and took a taxi from the station to the address on Twelfth Street and rang the bell. After a long interval and another ringing of the bell, the door lock clicked and he entered the dim-lit hall. The stairs were dark and the whole house seemed sunk in sleep. His footfalls rang out upon the silence. The air had a close, dead smell compounded of many elements, among which he could distinguish the dusty emanations of old wood and worn plankings and the ghostly reminders of many meals long since eaten. The light was out on the second-floor landing and the gloom was Stygian, so he groped along the wall until he found the door and rapped loudly with his knuckles.

In a moment the door was almost jerked off its hinges, and George, his hair dishevelled, his eyes red with sleep, an old bathrobe flung hastily over his pyjamas, stood framed in the opening, blinking out into the darkness. Randy was a little taken back by the change in his appearance in the six months since he had last seen him. His face, which had always had a youthful and even childish quality, had grown older and sterner. The lines had deepened. And now his heavy lip stuck out at his caller with a menacing challenge, and his whole pug-nosed countenance had a bulldog look of grim truculence.

When Randy recovered from his first surprise he cried out heartily:

“Now wait a minute! Wait a minute! Don’t shoot! I’m not that fellow at all!”

At the unexpected sound of the familiar voice George looked startled, then his face broke into a broad smile of incredulity and delight. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he cried, and with that he seized hold of Randy, wrung him vigorously by the hand, almost dragged him into the room, and then held him off at arm’s length while he grinned his pleasure and amazement.

“That’s better,” said Randy in a tone of mock relief. “I was afraid it might be permanent.”

They now clapped each other on the back and exchanged those boisterous and half-insulting epithets with which two men who have been old friends like to greet each other when they meet. Then, almost at once, George asked Randy eagerly about the bank. Randy told him. George listened intently to the shocking details of the catastrophe. It was even worse than he had supposed, and he kept firing questions at Randy. At last Randy said:

“Well, that’s just about the whole story. I’ve told you all I know. But come, we can talk about that later. What I want to know is—how the hell are you? You’re not cracking up, too, are you? Your last letters made me a little uneasy about you.”

In their joy at seeing one another again and their eagerness to talk, they had both remained standing by the door. But now, as Randy put his casual finger on George’s sore spot, George winced and began to pace back and forth in an agitated way without answering.

Randy saw that he looked tired. His eyes were bloodshot, as if he had not slept well, and his unshaved face made him look haggard. The old bathrobe he was wearing had all the buttons missing, and the corded rope that belonged to it was also gone and George had lashed a frayed necktie round the middle to hold the thing together. This remarkable garment added to his general appearance of weariness and exhaustion. His features as he strode about the room had the contracted intensity of nervous strain, and as he looked up quickly Randy saw the worry and apprehension in his eyes.

Suddenly he paused and faced Randy squarely, and with a grim set to his jaws said:

“All right, let me have it! What are they saying now?”

“Who? What is who saying?”

“The people back home. That’s what you meant, isn’t it? From what they’ve written me and said to my face, I can imagine what they’re saying behind my back. Let’s have it and get it over with. What are they saying now?”

“Why,” said Randy, “I don’t know that they’re saying anything. Oh, they said plenty at first—just the kind of thing they wrote you. But since the bank failed I don’t think I’ve heard your name mentioned. They’ve got too much real trouble to worry about now.”

George looked incredulous, and then relieved. For a moment he studied the floor and said nothing. But as his sense of relief spread its soothing balm upon his agitated spirit he looked up and smiled broadly at his friend, and then, realising for the first time that Randy was standing there with his back against the door, he suddenly remembered his duties as a host and burst out impulsively and warmly:

“God, Randy, I’m glad to see you! I can’t get over it! Sit down. Sit down! Can’t you find a chair somewhere? For Christ’s sake, where are all the chairs in this dump?”

With that he went over to a chair that was piled high with manuscript and books, brushed these things off unceremoniously on to the floor, and shoved the chair across the room towards his friend.

He apologised now for the coldness of the place, explaining unnecessarily that the door-bell had got him out of bed, and telling Randy to keep his overcoat on and that it would be warmer in a little while. Then he vanished through a doorway into a noisome cubby-hole, turned on a faucet, and came back with a coffee-pot full of water. This he proceeded to pour into the spout of the radiator that stood below a window. When this was done, he got down on his hands and knees, peered about underneath, struck a match, turned some sort of valve, and applied the flame. There was an immediate blast, and pretty soon the water began to rattle and gurgle in the pipes.

“It’s gas,” he said, as he clambered to his feet. “That’s the worst thing about this place—it gives me headaches when I have to spend long hours working here.”

While this operation had been going on, Randy took a look round. The room, which was really two large rooms thrown together when the sliding-doors that joined them were pushed into the wall, as now, seemed as big as a barn. The windows at the front gave on to the street, and those at the rear looked out over some bleak little squares of backyard fences to another row of buildings. The first impression Randy got was one of staleness: the whole apartment had that unmistakable look and feeling of a place where someone has lived and where something has been finished so utterly that there is no going back to it. It was not merely the disorder everywhere—the books strewn around, the immense piles of manuscript, the haphazard scattering of stray socks, shirts and collars, old shoes, and unpressed trousers inside out. It was not even the dirty cup and saucer filled with old cigarette-butts, all of them stained with rancid coffee, which was set down in the vast and untidy litter of the table. It was just that life had gone out of all these things—they were finished—all as cold and tired and stale as the old dirty cup and the exhausted butts.

George was living in the midst of this dreary waste with a kind of exasperated and unhappy transciency. Randy saw that he had caught him on the wing, in that limbo of waiting between work which is one of the most tormenting periods a writer can know. He was through with one thing, and yet not really ready to settle down in earnest to another. He was in a state of furious but exhausted ferment. But it was not merely that he was going through a period of gestation before going on with his next book. Randy realised that the reception of his first, the savagery of the attack against him in Libya Hill, the knowledge that he had done something more than write a book—that he had also torn up violently by the roots all those ties of friendship and sentiment that bind a man to home—all of this, Randy felt, had so bewildered and overwhelmed him that now he was caught up in the maelstrom of the conflict which he had himself produced. He was not ready to do another piece of work because his energies were still being absorbed and used up by the repercussions of the first.

Moreover, as Randy looked round the room and his eye took in the various objects that contributed to its incredible chaos, he saw, in a dusty corner, a small green smock or apron, wrinkled as though it had been thrown aside with a gesture of weary finality, and beside it, half-folded inwards, a single small and rather muddy overshoe. The layer of dust upon them showed that they had lain there for months. These were the only poignant ghosts, and Randy knew that something which had been there in that room had gone out of it for ever—that George was done with it.

Randy saw how it was with George, and felt that almost any decisive act would be good for him. So now he said:

“For God’s sake, George, why don’t you pack up and clear out of all this? You’re through with it—it’s finished—it’ll only take you a day or two to wind the whole thing up. So pull yourself together and get out. Move away somewhere—anywhere—just to enjoy the luxury of waking up in the morning and finding none of this round you.”

“I know,” said George, going over to a sagging couch and tossing back the pile of foul-looking bedclothes that covered it and flinging himself down wearily. “I’ve thought of it,” he said.

Randy did not press the point. He knew it would be no use. George would have to work round to it in his own way and in his own good time.

George shaved and dressed, and they went out for breakfast. Then they returned and talked all morning, and were finally interrupted by the ringing of the telephone.

George answered it. Randy could tell by the sounds which came from the transmitter that the caller was female, garrulous, and unmistakably Southern. George did nothing for a while but blurt out polite banalities:

“Well now, that’s fine…I certainly do appreciate it…That’s mighty nice of you…Well now, I’m certainly glad you called. I hope you will remember me to all of them.” Then he was silent, listening intently, and Randy gathered from the contraction of his face that the conversation had now reached another stage. In a moment he said slowly, in a somewhat puzzled tone: “Oh, he is?…He did?…Well”—somewhat indefinitely—“that’s mighty nice of him…Yes, I’ll remember…Thank you very much…Good-bye.”

He hung up the receiver and grinned wearily.

“That,” he said, “was one of the I-just-called-you-up-to-tell-you-that— I’ve-read-it-all-every-word-of-it-and-I-think-it’s-perfectly-grand people—another lady from the South.” As he went on his voice unconsciously dropped into burlesque as he tried to imitate the unction of a certain type of Southern female whose words drip molasses mixed with venom:

“’Why, I’ll declayah, we’re all just so proud of yew-w! I’m just simply thrilled to daith! It’s the most wondaful thing I evah read! Why it is! Why, I nevah dreamed that anyone could have such a wondaful command of lang-widge!’”

“But don’t you like it just a little?” asked Randy. “Even if it’s laid on with a trowel, you must get some satisfaction from it.”

“God!” George said wearily, and came back and fell upon the couch. “If you only knew! That’s only one out of a thousand! That telephone there”— he jerked a thumb towards it—“has played a tune for months now! I know them all—I’ve got’em classified! I can tell by the tone of the voice the moment they speak whether it’s going to be type B or group X.”

“So the author is already growing jaded? He’s already bored with his first taste of fame?”

“Fame?”—disgustedly. “That’s not fame—that’s just plain damn rag-picking!”

“Then you don’t think the woman was sincere?”

“Yes”—his face and tone were bitter now—“she had all the sincerity of a carrion crow. She’ll go back and tell them that she talked to me, and by the time she’s finished with me she’ll have a story that every old hag in town can lick her chops and cackle over for the next six months.”

It sounded so unreasonable and unjust that Randy spoke up quickly:

“Don’t you think you’re being unfair?”

George’s head was down dejectedly and he did not even look up; with his hands plunged in his trouser pockets he just snorted something unintelligible but scornful beneath his breath.

It annoyed and disappointed Randy to see him acting so much like a spoiled brat, so he said:

“Look here! It’s about time you grew up and learned some sense It seems to me you’re being pretty arrogant. Do you think you can afford to be? I doubt if you or any man can go through life successfully playing the spoiled genius.”

Again he muttered something in a sullen tone.

“Maybe that woman was a fool,” Randy went on. “Well, a lot of people are. And maybe she hasn’t got sense enough to understand what you wrote in the way you think it should be understood. But what of it? She gave the best she had. It seems to me that instead of sneering at her now, you could be grateful.”

George raised his head: “You heard the conversation, then?”

“No, only what you told me.”

“All right, then—you didn’t get the whole story. I wouldn’t mind if she’d just called up to gush about the book, but, look here!”—he leaned towards Randy very earnestly and tapped him on the knee. “I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m just a conceited fool. I’ve lived through and found out about something these last few months that most people never have the chance to know. I give you my solemn word for it, that woman didn’t call up because she liked my book and wanted to tell me so. She called up,” he cried bitterly, “to pry round, and to find out what she could about me, and to pick my bones.”

“Oh, look here now—” Randy began impatiently.

“Yes, she did, too! I know what I’m talking about!” he said earnestly. “Here’s what you didn’t hear—here’s what she was working round to all the time—it came out at the end. I don’t know who she is, I never heard of her before—but she’s a friend of Ted Reeve’s wife. And apparently he thinks I put him in the book, and has been making threats that he’s going to kill me if I ever go back home.”

This was true; Randy had heard it in Libya Hill.

“That’s what it was about,” George sneered bitterly—“that woman’s call. That’s what most of the calls are about. They want to talk to the Beast of the Apocalypse, feel him out, and tell him:’Ted’s all right! Now don’t you believe all those things, you hear! He was upset at first—but he sees the whole thing now, the way you meant it—and everything’s all right.’That’s what she said to me, so maybe I’m not the fool you think I am!”

He was so earnest and excited that for a moment Randy did not answer him. Besides, making allowances for the distortion of his feelings, he could see some justice in what George said.

“Have you had many calls like that?” Randy asked.

“Oh”—wearily—“almost every day. I think everyone who has been up here from home since the book was published has telephoned me. They go about it in different ways. There are those who call me up as if I were some kind of ghoul:’How are you?’—in a small, quiet tone such as you might use to a condemned man just before they lead him to the death chamber at Sing Sing—’Are you all right?’And then you get alarmed, you begin to stammer and to stumble round,’Why, yes? Yes, I’m fine! Fine, thanks!’—meanwhile, beginning to feel yourself all over just to see if you’re all there. And then they say in that same still voice:’Well, I just wanted to know…I just called up to find out…I hope you’re all right.’”

After looking at Randy for a moment in a tormented and bewildered way, he burst out in an exasperated laugh:

“It’s been enough to give a hippopotamus the creeps! To listen to them talk, you’d think I was Jack the Ripper! Even those who call up to laugh and joke about it take the attitude that the only reason I wrote the book was to see how much dirt and filth I could dig up on people I didn’t like. Yes!” he cried bitterly. “My greatest supporters at home seem to be the disappointed little soda-jerkers who never made a go of it and the frustrated hangers-on who never got into the Country Club.’You sure did give it to that son-of-a-bitch, Jim So-and-so!’they call me up to tell me.’You sure did burn him up! I had to laugh when I read what you said about him—boy!’Or:’Why didn’t you say something about that bastard, Charlie What’s-his-name? I’d have given anything to see you take him for a ride!’…Jesus God!” He struck his fist upon his knee with furious exasperation. “That’s all it means to them: nothing but nasty gossip, slander, malice, envy, a chance of getting back at someone—you’d think that none of them had ever read a book before. Tell me,” he said earnestly, bending towards Randy, “isn’t there anyone there—anyone besides yourself—who gives a damn about the book itself? Isn’t there anyone who has read it as a book, who sees what it was about, who understands what I was trying to do?”

His eyes were full of torment now. It was out at last—the thing Randy had dreaded and wanted to avoid. He said:

“I should think you’d know more about that by this time than anyone. After all, you’ve had more opportunity than anyone else to find out.”

Well, that was out, too. It was the answer that he had to have, that he had feared to get. He stared at Randy for a minute or two with his tormented eyes, then he laughed bitterly and began to rave:

“Well, then, to hell with it! To hell with all of it!” He began to curse violently. “The small two-timing bunch of crooked sons-ofbitches! They can go straight to hell! They’ve done their best to ruin me!”

It was ignoble and unworthy and untrue. Randy saw that he was lashing himself into a fit of violent recrimination in which all that was worst and weakest m him was coming out—distortion, prejudice, and self-pity. These were the things he would have to conquer somehow or belost. Randy stopped him curtly:

“Now, no more of that! For God’s sake, George, pull yourself together! If a lot of damn fools read your book and didn’t understand it, that’s not Libya Hill, that’s the whole world. People there are no different from people anywhere. They thought you wrote about them—and the truth is, you did. So they got mad at you. You hurt their feelings, and you touched their pride. And, to be blunt about it, you opened up a lot of old wounds. There were places where you rubbed salt in. In saying this, I’m not like those others you complain about: you know damn wel! I understand what you did and why you had to do it. But just the same, there were some things that you did not have to do—and you’d have had a better book if you hadn’t done them. So don’t whine about it now. And don’t think you’re a martyr.”

But he had got himself primed into a mood of martyrdom. As Randy looked at him sitting there, one hand gripping his knee, his face sullen, his head brooding down between his hulking shoulders, he could see how this mood had grown upon him. To begin with, he had been naive not to realise how people would feel about some of the things he had written. Then, when the first accusing letters came, he had been overwhelmed and filled with shame and humility and guilt over the pain he had caused. But as time went on and the accusations became more vicious and envenomed, he had wanted to strike back and defend himself. When he saw there was no way to do that—when people answered his explanatory letters only with new threats and insults—he had grown bitter. And finally, after taking it all so hard and torturing himself through the whole gamut of emotions, he had sunk into this morass of self-pity.

George began to talk now about “the artist”, spouting all the intellectual and aesthetic small change of the period. The artist, it seemed, was a kind of fabulous, rare, and special creature who lived on “beauty” and “truth” and had thoughts so subtle that the average man could comprehend them no more than a mongrel could understand the moon he bayed at. The artist, therefore, could achieve his “art” only through a constant state of flight into some magic wood, some province of enchantment.

The phrases were so spurious that Randy felt like shaking him. And what annoyed him most was the knowledge that George was really so much better than this. He must know how cheap and false what he was saying really was. At last Randy said to him quietly:

“George, of all the people I have ever known, you are the least qualified to play the wounded faun.”

But he was so immersed in his fantasy that he paid no attention. He just said: “Huh?”—and then was off again. Anybody who was “a real artist,” he said, was doomed to be an outcast from society. His inevitable fate was to be “driven out by the tribe.”

It was all so wrong that Randy lost patience with him:

“For Christ’s sake, George, what’s the matter with you? You’re talking like a fool!” he said. “You haven’t been driven out of anywhere! You’ve only got yourself in a little hot water at home! Here you’ve been ranting your head off about’beauty’and’truth’! God! Why in hell, then, don’t you stop lying to yourself? Can’t you see? The truth is that for the first time in your life you’ve managed to get a foothold in the thing you want to do. Your book got some good notices and has had a fair sale. You’re in the right spot now to go on. So where have you been driven? No doubt all those threatening letters have made you feel like an exile from home, but hell, man!—you’ve been an exile for years. And of your own accord, too! You know you’ve had no intention of ever going back there to live. But just as soon as they started yelling for your scalp, you fooled yourself into believing you’d been driven out by force! And, as for this idea of yours that a man achieves’beauty’by escaping somewhere from the life he knows, isn’t the truth just the opposite? Haven’t you written me the same thing yourself a dozen times?”

“How do you mean?” he said sullenly.

“I mean, taking your own book as an example, isn’t it true that every good thing in it came, not because you withdrew from life, but because you got into it—because you managed to understand and use the life you knew?”

He was silent now. His face, which had been screwed up into a morose scowl, gradually began to relax and soften, and at last he looked up with a little crooked smile.

“I don’t know what comes over me sometimes,” he said. He shook his head and looked ashamed of himself and laughed. “You’re right, of course,” he went on seriously. “What you say is true. And that’s the way it has to be, too. A man must use what he knows—he can’t use what he doesn’t know…And that’s why some of the critics make me mad,” he added bluntly.

“How’s that?” asked Randy, glad to hear him talking sense at last. “Oh, you know,” he said, “you’ve seen the reviews. Some of them said the book was’too autobiographical’.”

This was surprising. And Randy, with the outraged howls of Libya Hill still ringing in his ears, and with George’s outlandish rantings in answer to those howls still echoing in the room, could hardly believe he had heard him aright. He could only say in frank astonishment:

“Well, it was autobiographical—you can’t deny it.”

“But not’too autobiographical’,” George went on earnestly. “If the critics had just crossed those words out and written in their place’not autobiographical enough’, they’d have hit it squarely. That’s where I failed. That’s where the real fault was.” There was no question that he meant it, for his face was twisted suddenly with a grimace, the scar of his defeat and shame. “My young hero was a stick, a fool, a prig, a snob, as Dedalus was—as in my own presentment of the book I was. There was the weakness. Oh, I know—there were lots of autobiographical spots in the book, and where it was true I’m not ashamed of it, but the hitching-post I tied the horses to wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t true autobiography. I’ve learned that now, and learned why. The failure comes from the false personal. There’s the guilt. That’s where the young genius business gets in—the young artist business, what you called a while ago the wounded faun business. It gets in and it twists the vision. The vision may be shrewd, subtle, piercing, within a thousand special frames accurate and Joycean—but within the larger one, false, mannered, and untrue. And the large one is the one that matters.”

He meant it now, and he was down to solid rock. Randy saw the measure of his suffering. And yet, now as before, he seemed to be going to extremes and taking it too hard. In some such measure all men fail, and Randy said:

“But was anything ever as good as it could be? Who succeeded anyway?”

“Oh, plenty did!” he said impatiently. “Tolstoy when he wrote War and Peace. Shakespeare when he wrote King Lear. Mark Twain in the first part of Life on the Mississippi. Of course they’re not as good as they might have been—nothing ever is. Only, they missed in the right way: they might have put the shot a little further—but they were not hamstrung by their vanity, shackled by their damned self-consciousness. That’s what makes for failure. That’s where I failed.”

“Then what’s the remedy?”

“To use myself to the top of my bent. To use everything I have. To milk the udder dry, squeeze out the last drop, until there is nothing left. And if I use myself as a character, to withhold nothing, to try to see and paint myself as I am—the bad along with the good, the shoddy alongside of the true—just as I must try to see and draw every other character. No more false personal, no more false pride, no more pettiness and injured feelings. In short, to kill the wounded faun.”

Randy nodded: “Yes. And what now? What comes next?”

“I don’t know,” he answered frankly. His eyes showed his perplexity. “That’s the thing that’s got me stumped. It’s not that I don’t know what to write about.—God!” he laughed suddenly. “You hear about these fellows who write one book and then can’t do another because they haven’t got anything else to write about!”

“You’re not worried about that?”

“Lord, no! My trouble’s all the other way round! I’ve got too much material. It keeps backing up on me”—he gestured round him at the tottering piles of manuscript that were everywhere about the room—“until sometimes I wonder what in the name of God I’m going to do with it all—how I’m going to find a frame for it, a pattern, a channel, a way to make it flow!” He brought his fist down sharply on his knee and there was a note of desperation in his voice. “Sometimes it actually occurs to me that a man may be able to write no more because he gets drowned in his own secretions!”

“So you’re not afraid of ever running dry?”

He laughed loudly. “At times I almost hope I will,” he said. “There’d be a kind of comfort in the thought that some day—maybe after I’m forty—I would dry up and become like a camel, living on my hump. Of course, I don’t really mean that either. It’s not good to dry up—it’s a form of death…No, that’s not what bothers me. The thing I’ve got to find out is the way!” He was silent a moment, staring at Randy, then he struck his fist upon his knee again and cried: “The way! The way! Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Randy, “I think I do. But how?”

George’s face was full of perplexity.. He was silent, trying to phrase his problem.

“I’m looking for a way,” he said at last. “I think it may be something like what people vaguely mean when they speak of fiction. A kind of legend, perhaps. Something—a story—composed of all the knowledge I have, of all the living I’ve seen. Not the facts, you understand—not just the record of my life—but something truer than the facts—something distilled out of my experience and transmitted into a form of universal application. That’s what the best fiction is, isn’t it?”

Randy smiled and nodded encouragement. George was all right. He needn’t have worried about him. He would work his way out of the morass. So Randy said cheerfully:

“Have you started the new book yet?”

He began to talk rapidly, and again Randy saw worried tension in his eyes.

“Yes,” he said, “I’ve written a whole lot. These ledgers here”—he indicated a great stack of battered ledgers on the table—“and all this manuscript”—he swept his arms in a wide gesture round the room—“they are full of new writing. I must have written half a million words or more.”

Randy then made the blunder which laymen so often innocently make when they talk to writers.

“What’s it about?” he said.

He was rewarded with an evil scowl. George did not answer. He began to pace up and down, thinking to himself with smouldering intensity. At last he stopped by the table, turned and faced Randy, and, with the redemptive honesty that was the best thing in him, bluntly said:

“No, I haven’t started my new book yet!…Thousands of words”—he whacked the battered ledgers with a flattened palm—“hundreds of ideas, dozens of scenes, of scraps, of fragments—but no book!…And”—the worried lines about his eyes now deepened—“time goes by! It has been almost five months since the other book was published, and now”—he threw his arms out towards the huge stale chaos of that room with a gesture of exasperated fury—“here I am! Time gets away from me before I know that it has gone! Time!” he cried, and smote his fist into his palm and stared before him with a blazing and abstracted eye as though he saw a ghost—“Time!”

His enemy was Time. Or perhaps it was his friend. One never knows for sure.

Randy stayed in New York several days, and the two friends talked from morning till night and from night till morning. Everything that came into their heads they talked about. George would stride back and forth across the floor in his restless way, talking or listening to Randy, and suddenly would pause beside the table, scowl, look round him as though he were seeing the room for the first time, bring down his hand with a loud whack on a pile of manuscript, and boom out:

“Do you know what the reason is for all these words I’ve written? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because I’m so damned lazy!”

“It doesn’t look like the room of a lazy man to me,” said Randy, laughing.

“It is though,” George answered. “That’s why it looks this way. You know”—his face grew thoughtful as he spoke—“I’ve got an idea that a lot of the work in this world gets done by lazy people. That’s the reason they work—because they’re so lazy.”

“I don’t follow you,” said Randy, “but go on—spill it—get it off your chest.”

“Well,” he said, quite seriously, “it’s this way: you work because you’re afraid not to. You work because you have to drive yourself to such a fury to begin. That part’s just plain hell 1 It’s so hard to get started that once you do you’re afraid of slipping back. You’d rather do anything than go through all that agony again—so you keep going—you keep going faster all the time—you keep going till you couldn’t stop even if you wanted to. You forget to eat, to shave, to put on a clean shirt when you have one. You almost forget to sleep, and when you do try to you can’t—because the avalanche has started, and it keeps going night and day. And people say:’Why don’t you stop some time? Why don’t you forget about it now and then? Why don’t you take a few days off?’And you don’t do it because you can’t—you can’t stop yourself—and even if you could you’d be afraid to because there’d be all that hell to go through getting started up again. Then people say you’re a glutton for work, but it isn’t so. It’s laziness—just plain, damned, simple laziness, that’s all.”

Randy laughed again. He had to—it was so much like George—no one else could have come out with a thing like that. And what made it so funny was that he knew George saw the humour of it, too, and yet was desperately in earnest. He could imagine the weeks and months of solemn cogitation that had brought George to this paradoxical conclusion, and now, like a whale after a long plunge, he was coming up to spout and breathe.

“Well, I see your point,” Randy said. “Maybe you’re right. But at least it’s a unique way of being lazy.”

“No,” George answered, “I think it’s probably a very natural one. Now take all those fellows that you read about,” he went on excitedly —“Napoleon—and—and Balzac—and Thomas Edison”—he burst out triumphantly—“these fellows who never sleep more than an hour or two at a time, and can keep going night and day—why, that’s not because they love to work! It’s because they’re really lazy—and afraid not to work because they know they’re lazy! Why, hell yes!” he went on enthusiastically. “I know that’s the way it’s been with all those fellows! Old Edison now,” he said scornfully, “going round pretending to people that he works all the time because he likes it!”

“You don’t believe that?”

“Hell, no!”—scornfully. “I’ll bet you anything you like that if you could really find out what’s going on in old Edison’s mind, you’d find that he wished he could stay in bed every day until two o’clock in the afternoon! And then get up and scratch himself! And then lie around in the sun for a while! And hang round with the boys down at the village store, talking about politics, arid who’s going to win the World Series next autumn!”

“Then what keeps him from it, if that’s what he wants to do?”

“Why,” he cried impatiently, “laziness! That’s all. He’s afraid to do it because he knows he’s so damned lazy! And he’s ashamed of being lazy, and afraid he’ll get found out! That’s why!”

“Ah, but that’s another thing! Why is he ashamed of it?”

“Because,” he said earnestly, “every time he wants to lie in bed until two o’clock in the afternoon, he hears the voice of his old man——”

“His old man?”

“Sure. His father.” He nodded vigorously.

“But Edison’s father has been dead for years, hasn’t he?”

“Sure—but that doesn’t matter. He hears him just the same. Every time he rolls over to get an extra hour or two, I’ll bet you he hears old Pa Edison hollering at him from the foot of the stairs, telling him to get up, and that he’s not worth powder enough to blow him sky high, and that when he was his age, he’d been up four hours already and done a whole day’s work—poor, miserable orphan that he was!”

“Really, I didn’t know that. Was Edison’s father an orphan?”

“Sure—they all are when they holler at you from the foot of the stairs. And school was always at least six miles away, and they were always barefooted, and it was always snowing. God!” he laughed suddenly. “No one’s old man ever went to school except under polar conditions. They all did. And that’s why you get up, that’s why you drive yourself, because you’re afraid not to—afraid of’that damned Joyner blood in you.’…So I’m afraid that’s the way it’s going to be with me until the end of my days. Every time I see the Ile de France or the Aquitania or theBerengaria backing into the river and swinging into line on Saturday, and see the funnels with their racing slant, and the white breasts of the great liners, and something catches at my throat, and suddenly I hear mermaids singing—I’ll also hear the voice of the old man yelling at me from as far as back as I can remember, and telling me I’m not worth the powder to blow me up. And every time I dream of tropic isles, of plucking breadfruit from the trees, or of lying stretched out beneath a palm-tree in Samoa, fanned by an attractive lady of those regions clad in her latest string of beads—I’ll hear the voice of the old man. Every time I dream of lying sprawled out with Peter Breughel in Cockaigne, with roast pigs trotting by upon the hoof, and with the funnel of a beer bung in my mouth—I’ll hear the voice of the old man. Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all. I’m lazy—but every time I surrender to my baser self, the old man hollers from the stairs.”

George was full of his own problems and talked about them constantly. Randy was an understanding listener. But suddenly one day, towards the end of Randy’s visit, the thought struck George as strange that his friend should be taking so much time off from his job. He asked Randy about it. How had he managed it?

“I haven’t got a job,” Randy answered quietly with his little embarrassed laugh. “They threw me out.”

“You mean to say that that bastard Merrit—” George began, hot with instant anger.

“Oh, don’t blame him,” Randy broke in. “He couldn’t help it. The higher-ups were on his tail and he had to do it. He said I wasn’t getting the business, and it’s true—I wasn’t. But what the Company doesn’t know is that nobody can get the business any more. It isn’t there, and hasn’t been for the last year or so. You saw how it was when you were home. Every penny anybody could get hold of went into real estate speculation. That was the only business they had left down there. And now, of course, that’s gone, too, since the bank failed.”

“And do you mean to say,” George commented, speaking the words slowly and with emphasis—“do you mean to say that Merrit seized that moment to throw you out on your ear? Why, the dirty——”

“Yes,” said Randy. “I got the sack just a week after the bank closed. I don’t know whether Merrit figured that was the best time to get rid of me or whether it just happened so. But what’s the difference? It’s been coming for a long time. I’ve seen it coming for a year or more. It was just a question of when. And believe me,” he said with quiet emphasis, “I’ve been through hell. I lived from day to day in fear and dread of it, knowing it was coming and knowing there wasn’t anything I could do to head it off. But the funny thing is, now it’s happened I feel relieved.” He smiled his old clear smile. “It’s the truth,” he said. “I never would have had the guts to quit—I was making pretty good money, you know—but now that I’m out, I’m glad. I’d forgotten how it felt to be a free man. Now I can hold my head up and look anybody in the eye and tell the Great Man, Paul S. Appleton himself, to go to the devil. It’s a good feeling. I like it.”

“But what are you going to do, Randy?” asked George with evident concern.

“I don’t know,” said Randy cheerfully. “I haven’t any plans. All the years I was with the Company I lived pretty well, but I also managed to save a little something. And, luckily, I didn’t put it in the Citizens Trust, or in real estate either, so I’ve still got it. And I own the old family house. Margaret and I can get along all right for a while. Of course, jobs that pay as well as the one I had don’t turn up round every corner, but this is a big country and there’s always a place for a good man. Did you ever hear of a good man who couldn’t find work?” he said.

“Well, you can’t be too sure of that,” said George, shaking his head dubiously. “Maybe I’m wrong,” he went on, pausing and frowning thoughtfully, “but I don’t think the Stock Market crash and the bank failure in Libya Hill were isolated events. I’m coming to feel,” he said, “that we may be up against something new—something that’s going to cut deeper than anything America has experienced before. The papers are beginning to take it seriously. They’re calling it a depression. Everybody seems to be scared.”

“Oh, pshaw!” said Randy with a laugh. “You are feeling low. That’s because you live in New York. Here the Stock Market is everything. When it’s high, times are good; when it’s low, they’re bad. But New York is not America.”

“I know,” said George. “But I’m not thinking about the Stock Market. I’m thinking about America…Sometimes it seems to me,” he continued slowly, like a man who gropes his way in darkness over an unfamiliar road, “that America went off the track somewhere—back round the time of the Civil War, or pretty soon afterwards. Instead of going ahead and developing along the line in which the country started out, it got shunted off in another direction—and now we look round and see we’ve gone places we didn’t mean to go. Suddenly we realise that America has turned into something ugly—and vicious—and corroded at the heart of its power with easy wealth and graft and special privilege…And the worst of it is the intellectual dishonesty which all this corruption has bred. People are afraid to think straight—afraid to face themselves—afraid to look at things and see them as they are. We’ve become like a nation of advertising men, all hiding behind catch phrases like’prosperity’and’rugged individualism’and’the American way’. And the real things like freedom, and equal opportunity, and the integrity and worth of the individual—things that have belonged to the American dream since the beginning—they have become just words, too. The substance has gone out of them—they’re not real any more…Take your own case. You say you feel free at last because you’ve lost your job. I don’t doubt it—but it’s a funny kind of freedom. And just how free are you?”

“Well, free enough to suit me,” said Randy heartily. “And, funny or not, I’m freer than I’ve ever been before. Free enough to take my time and look round a bit before I make a new connection. I don’t want to get in with another outfit like the old one. I’ll land on my feet,” he said serenely.

“But how are you going to do it?” asked George. “There can’t be anything for you in Libya Hill, with the bottom dropped out of everything down there.”

“Hell, I’m not wedded to the place!” said Randy. “I’ll go anywhere. Remember, I’ve been a salesman all my life—I’m used to travelling round. And I have friends in the game—in other lines—who’ll help me. That’ s one good thing about being a salesman: if you can sell one thing, you can sell anything, and it’s easy to switch products. I know my way round,” he concluded with strong confidence. “Don’t you worry about me.”

They said very little more about it. And when Randy left, his parting words at the station were:

“Well, so long, fellow! You’re going to be all right. But don’t forget to kill that wounded faun! As for me, I don’t know just what the next move is, but I’m on my way!”

With that he got aboard his train, and was gone.

But George wasn’t too sure about Randy. And the more he thought about him, the less sure he became. Randy had certainly not been licked by what had happened to him, and that was good; but there was something about his attitude—his cheerful optimism in the face of disaster—that seemed spurious. He had the clearest head of anybody George knew, but it was almost as if he had shut off one compartment of his brain and wasn’t using at. It was all very puzzling.

“There are tides in the affairs of men,” George thought musingly—“definite periods of ebb and flow…And when they come, they come, and can’t be held back by wishing.”

That was it, perhaps. It seemed to George that Randy was caught in the ebb and didn’t know it. And that was what made it so queer and puzzling—that he, of all people, shouldn’t know it.

Also, he had spoken about not wanting to get mixed up with another outfit like the old one. Did he think the fearful pressures he had been subject to were peculiar to the company he had been working for, and that their counterparts existed nowhere else? Did he suppose he could escape those conditions just by changing jobs? Did he believe it was possible by such a shift to enjoy all the glorious advantages he had ever dreamed of as a bright, ambitious youth—high income and good living far beyond what most men are accustomed to—and to do it without paying the cost in other ways?

“What will you have? quoth God; pay for it, and take it,” said Emerson, in that wonderful essay on “Compensation” that every American ought to be required by law to read…Well, that was true. One always paid for it…

Good Lord! Didn’t Randy know you can’t go home again?

The next few years were terrible ones for all America, and especially terrible for Randy Shepperton.

He didn’t get another job. He tried everything, but nothing worked. There just weren’t any jobs. Men were being let off by the thousands everywhere, and nowhere were new ones being taken on.

After eighteen months his savings were gone, and he was desperate. He had to sell the old family house, and what he got for it was a mere pittance. He and Margaret rented a small apartment, and for another year or so, by careful management, they lived on what the house had brought them. Then that, too, was gone. Randy was on his uppers now. He fell ill, and it was an illness of the spirit more than of the flesh. At last, when there was nothing else to do, he and Margaret moved away from Libya Hill and went to live with the older sister who was married, and stayed there with her husband’s family—dependents on the bounty of these kindly strangers.

And at the end of all of this, Randy—he of the clear eyes and the quick intelligence—he who was nobody’s fool—he who thought he loved the truth and had always been able to see straight to the heart of most things—Randy went on relief.

And by that time George thought he understood it. Behind Randy’s tragedy George thought he could see a personal devil in the form of a very bright and plausible young man, oozing confidence and crying: “Faith!” when there was no faith, and dressed like a travelling salesman. Yes, salesmanship had done its job too well. Salesmanship—that commercial brand of special pleading—that devoted servant of self-interest—that sworn enemy of truth. George remembered how Randy had been able to look at his alien problem and see it in the abstract, whole and clear, because there was no self-interest to cast its shadow on his vision. He could save others—himself he could not save, because he could no longer see the truth about himself.

And it seemed to George that Randy’s tragedy was the essential tragedy of America. America—the magnificent, unrivalled, unequalled, unbeatable, unshrinkable, supercolossal, 99-and-44-one-hundredths-per-cent-pure, schoolgirl-complexion, covers-the-earth, I’d-walk-a-mile-for-it, four-out-of-five-have-it, his master’s-voice, askthe-man-who-owns-one, blueplate-special home of advertising, salesmanship, and special pleading in all its many catchy and beguiling forms.

Had not the real rulers of America—the business men—been wrong about the depression from the start? Had they not pooh-poohed it and tried to wipe it out with words, refusing to see it for what it was? Had they not kept saying that prosperity was just round the corner—long after “prosperity”, so-called, had vanished, and the very corner it was supposed to be round had flattened out and bent into a precipitate downward curve of hunger, want, and desperation?

Well, Randy had been right about the wounded faun. For George knew now that his own self-pity was just his precious egotism coming between him and the truth he strove for as a writer. What Randy didn’t know was that business also had its wounded fauns. And they, it seemed, were a species that you could not kill so lightly. For business was the most precious form of egotism—self-interest at its dollar value. Kill that with truth, and what would be left?

A better way of life, perhaps, but it would not be built on business as we know it.