The Other Horseman Read online

  The Other Horseman

  by

  PHILIP WYLIE

  FARRAR & RINEHART, INC.

  NEW YORK TORONTO

  COPYRIGHT, 1942, BY PHILIP WYLIE

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  THE OTHER HORSEMAN

  THERE IS a legend concerning John, the Prophet, to the effect that he lost in Ephesus, in the year 89 A.D., the first transcription of his Vision. This version was come upon by the Romans, from whom he had precipitately fled, and read by a certain Centurion before it was officially burned according to the Emperor's orders. It is said to be a second version, written by the Prophet in hiding some twelve months later, that concludes the New Testament. Of the first and original account, only one fragment survives, John's recollection of the "other horseman" which appears in a letter written either by, or for, the Centurion, to a poet named Marcus. The letter (if there was one) is supposed to have been lost during the persecutions of Diocletian. Thus the account was preserved only by word of mouth, although it is said to have been a favorite of Saint Leo the Great, as early as the middle of the fifth century. The Apocalyptic legend follows: After the breaking of the Fourth Seal, and after the emergence of the Pale Horseman, Death, John saw yet another horseman, now recorded as Hell, but originally given another name. This Fifth Rider went forward with the other Four, and, indeed, led them. War and Pestilence, Famine and Death scourged the world of men. These grim figures had somewhat different names in the lost Apocalypse: Conquest, Slaughter, Greed, and Universal Death, i.e., death by famine, by pestilence, by the sword, and by all human passions.

  As mankind fell by a third and yet another third, and as the seas turned to blood and fiery glass, the Horseman in the Lead became nauseated by the deeds of his fellows.

  He therefore pressed far ahead of them, entering every village and city with a great cry and a terrifying warning. To the rulers of each city he told of those who came hard behind him and he showed them the blood on his horse's hooves. Then, always, he went on, for his urgency was great.

  Behind him, men fell into profound arguments, some saying that he was a liar, some that the blood on the hooves was not of men but of goats, and some that he had not passed that way at all, but was only an imagining of the people. These arguments consumed much time and took many peculiar theological bents. In the end, the warning did not anywhere prevail. The Four Riders arrived and slew their three times tens of thousands.

  Meanwhile, the Fifth Horseman had come to the outermost reaches of the earth and so turned about, well satisfied with his work. However, as he came upon first one and then another desolated city, anger mounted in him. When he questioned the survivors about the warning they had been given, he found them unrepentant. They did not say they had been fools to disobey the alarm. They did not say that the arrogant stupidity of their rulers had betrayed them and robbed them of their homes, their loved ones, and their birthright. Instead, in one voice, they blamed him who had carried the message. "He should have tarried longer with us and talked in a louder voice," the weeping people cried. "He should have seen our helplessness and stayed with us to defend us," they said.

  And they said, "It is his fault; had he not come this way, the others would not have followed!"

  So, because his wrath was very great, and because the truth was not in these people, the Fifth Horseman rejoined his companions. Together they slew all mankind and destroyed all their cities. And the name of him who led, and of him who warned, according to the legend, was Reality.

  The Other Horseman

  CHAPTER I

  IN SPITE of the proverb, a lucky prophet is sometimes honored in his home town, Jimmie thought. The train rounded down a grade; shredded steam blew back from the locomotive. The scenery became minute by minute more cogent, and at last, altogether familiar. Too familiar for Jimmie in a way. His eyes stung and the sensation astonished him. He had thought he was past all that, young to be past it--twenty-eight--but past it, nonetheless. As far past as if he were ninety and the very ducts that carry tears had dried up. He grinned, sniffed in a breath, and yanked the back of his hand across the upper part of his face. Six years in England--and in two more minutes, home.

  The train clanged out on the high iron bridge over the Muskogewan. He could see the skating house--white snow and ice, fast water, brightly dressed kids whizzing among the grownups--and that was gone; the Dairymeade barns flashed past--the fields, rolling, black, white, lithographic; home--after all these years! The red brick station was swinging into view around the curve. A warm flush pervaded him, as if he had stepped in front of a fireplace.

  Jimmie grappled with the heaviest of his leather suitcases, the one most battered, deepest scratched, most raggedly shingled with European hotel labels. There was a big

  "V" pasted on its side. He was on the platform when the train slowed. There was his father-six years older, not looking it; his mother--red-cheeked, gray-haired, handsome; and there was his brother, Biff--he'd be twenty-one, now--Jimmie had already made the adjustment in his mind. He looked for his sister. Sarah had been twelve when he'd gone away on the Rhodes Scholarship. At first, he glanced past the pretty woman. He realized, while his eyes were in a nether focus, that the pretty woman was Sarah. The whole fam dambley. It was wonderful!

  He hopped down while the train was still slowing and slid in the snow a little way and kissed his mother and his sister and shook hands twice, each, with his father and his brother. There were other people waiting to greet Jimmie, but those people let his family have the first crack; they simply stood around, grinning and happy.

  Jimmie's eyes were taking in the changes of six years and he was pleased with what he saw. Sarah, especially, was like a miracle. But the others weren't quite pleased.

  Their expressions showed it, inch-meal. Perhaps he had more of an accent than he'd thought.

  "You've changed, son!" His father seemed truculent about it.

  Jimmie chuckled. "A kid went to Oxford. This is what's coming back."

  "Terribly thin," his mother said. "It's the rations, no doubt."

  Jimmie still laughed. "Oh, I got plenty to eat. Lord! Sarah! Hollywood'll send for you if you show that face around much!"

  All three men picked up bags. Jim put his down again to shake hands embarrassedly with a dozen people whose faces were familiar but whose names were lost in six weltering years. They supplied them and told him what businesses they were in or where they lived, and he remembered fragments. Then the Baileys started around the station, chattering about the unseasonable freeze and snowstorm. Biff got to the car first and opened the door; Jimmie stood outside for a minute, looking at it.

  "A 'forty-two," Biff said exultantly. "Like it?"

  "Yeah." Jimmie's enthusiasm was not great. "It's magnificent. Haven't seen the new American models for a long time. It's a peach. Drives itself, I'll bet. Sees in the dark and plays records."

  They laughed, but not quite certainly. The car started. Jimmie peered from a window while his family partially recovered from some vague emotion he was beginning to feel in them--a sort of disappointment, probably. Jimmie filed it away and allowed himself to revel in remembered geography, in architecture recalled. Muskogewan's highest structure--the Purvis Building, eleven stories--and the old Post Office, empty, across from a modernistic new one, the fire house, the Horkin Store, "A Block of Bargains," and Dunley's Drug Store. Ordinary stuff, dream-poignant for Jimmie.

  They turned at the Athletic Club and went out Park Street. There were changes in the old home too. The gingerbread trimmed away, some glass brick windows in the walls, a glassed-in porch around at the side, and a real garage instead of the barn, which had served for so long. A four-car garage. They st
opped in the place where the porte-cochere had been and bustled out, talking again. His mother mostly--gossip about people and places and the new differences--nothing that meant as much to Jimmie as observing for himself. And they wondered why he had stayed away so long. So did he--now. He'd been very busy. Very busy. . . .

  A manservant opened the door--a white man--and Jimmie remembered that his mother had been afraid of male servants, once. He cocked an internal eyebrow. The Baileys had gone a bit swank since his departure. Not very; just some. They could doubtless afford it. His father was an officer in one of the two biggest banks; Biff and Sarah had finished school. Nothing more logical than to spend a little on improving the manor house. It was still comparatively modest.

  The furniture in the living room was modern. There was an electrical piano and a superautomatic phonograph-radio, but the fireplace was the same and so were the oak logs burning in it--another beloved recollection. His father offered him a cigar and he took it. Coats were handed to the servant. They sat down, Sarah and his mother and Biff with cigarettes. Jimmie drew on the cigar and looked at it and looked at them and smiled sleepily. That was, usually, his way of smiling--the long smile of a man with good nerves and a warm heart.

  His mother said, "I've been rattling on, Jimmie! You haven't had a chance! And we're all dying to hear! So tell us everything about it!"

  He had a sinking feeling; he thought he knew what she meant. "About what, Mother?"

  "About what? The war, of course!"

  He tried to go on smiling. "I've been on a slow boat from Lisbon for a whole lot of days. I was in New York for less than two hours. And last night and this morning on a train. You tell me."

  His father laughed. When he laughed, Jimmie could see he had aged considerably.

  "Hannah doesn't mean the situation today. Everybody knows that. She wants the personal experience angle, Jimmie. Especially the bombings. Your letters weren't very frequent or very satisfying. Censorship, no doubt. But Hannah has a passion for bombing stories.

  Reads everything she can lay her hands on."

  "I think," said his mother, "the British are positively thrilling. We're all ears, Jimmie!"

  He shrugged and shook his head, as if to himself. "I was working in a laboratory on the fringe of London. I was very busy. A bomb fell, once, within maybe six blocks of our place. It made quite a mess of a cow pasture." He was lying.

  "Don't be a hold-out! You wrote you were in London summer before last--in the very worst of the blitz!"

  "--and I stayed as far underground as I could!"

  Biff leaned forward. "You must have seen places, though, soon after they'd been hit?"

  Jimmie stuck his jaw out. "Yes."

  "He's just trying to be dramatic," Sarah said. "Building up suspense."

  The man just come from England looked at his sister. She had direct, diamond-shaped eyes, with dark fringes, like her mother's. Dark hair that fell to the nape of her neck in a triumph of sumptuous grooming. She was wearing a blue dress. She was alive with interest and the presumption of understanding. "I'm not trying to build up any suspense, Sarah," he answered slowly. "The bombs do that, without assistance. I'm just trying to say--without having to, but I guess I do--that I don't want to talk about bombings. Really, I don't. Nothing to say you haven't read a hundred times, for one thing.

  And not in the mood, for another. I'm glad to be back, hideously glad." He looked at his wrist watch. "And if somebody'll drive me--since I'm not positive I could get one of these new cars started, even--I'll run over to see Corinth."

  His mother gasped. "But you can't, dear! You simply can't! It's four, now--"

  "I know. And old man Corinth may go home by five--"

  She paid no attention. "--and at half-past the people will begin to stream in.

  Simply stream! They're dying to see you!"

  "People? What people?"

  "Why, the people I invited for cocktails! I must have asked a hundred. Dinner isn't till nine--on account of it. And we'll have to change, because we're going to the club for it. An intime little crowd. I promised you'd be here at four-thirty!"

  Jimmie smiled again, differently. "Sorry I won't then. I'll duck back as fast as I can after I talk to Corinth, though. Ought not to take forever."

  Mrs. Bailey's diamond-shaped eyes narrowed. A faint flush showed in her cheeks.

  "Why, dear, it's quite impossible for you to go over to the factory today. I'm sure Mr.

  Corinth doesn't expect you, because Susie Corinth is coming here for cocktails and I told her to bring him."

  Jimmie raised his eyebrows. "Is he coming?"

  "Later," she said. «He'll be kept at his office--"

  "Then I'll go over."

  "James!" There was a strident note in her voice. She started, twice, to speak imperatively, to demand that he stay. But she could not find the right words--or, if she found them, could not utter them--because he kept looking at her, waiting for anything she might have to say.

  His father interrupted this silence. "It is pretty darned, well, selfish of you, son.

  We've planned the whole weekend for you. Thought, even, you might not feel like starting at the paint works for a month or so. You wrote you've been going at it hard."

  Jimmie glanced from face to face, hunting for something he did not find. Then he walked toward the hall, passing close to his sister.

  "Cad," she said softly.

  Biff rallied. ''I'll run you over--since you're going."

  They were riding through the crystalline landscape again. "You're kind of rough on them," Biff said. "They've built up this homecoming into a fiesta. After all, you're a legend around here. I suppose they expected something between an adoring undergraduate and a polished English earl."

  "But I wrote 'em why I was coming home!"

  "Sure. To work for old man Corinth at the paint company. They were pleased as punch you got a job right here in town."

  "I mean, the Corinth plant can do certain things and I knew it, and the British agreed to lend me to the U. S. because I'm sort of a specialist on some lines--"

  "Oh, that!" Biff grinned. "Mother and Father don't know the difference between chemistry and astronomy."

  "Still, they know there's a war going on--"

  "Yeah," said Biff. "And do they resent it! All except the dramatic part. Mom goes for that in a big way. She is to battles what an affecionado is to bulls."

  Jimmie winced.

  The Corinth Paint and Dye Works loomed on the penumbral fringe of the town--a haphazard agglomeration of low buildings. Behind the buildings, chimneys poured smoke across the gray sky--black smoke and bright yellow smoke. There was a high fence around the plant and around the fence two uniformed guards, portly and important, paced back and forth, carrying revolvers on their fat stomachs. Biff and Jimmie were stopped at a gatehouse and allowed to pass after stating their errand. The office which received them was time-battered--a big place, full of ticking typewriters and people hurrying in and out with sheafs of papers. Biff said he'd wait there, but Jimmie insisted he'd take a cab home; so Biff went away, a little angered by his brother's concentration on his errand and its importance.

  Jimmie followed Mr. Corinth's secretary between the rows of clattering desks into a small, dusty room. A man with vague gray eyes and a white mustache sat there, behind the ruins of a mahogany desk. He wore a suit of clothes a tramp would not have taken as a present. He frowned fustily at Jimmie and muttered, "Your name is somehow familiar, so I asked you in, but I'm in a hurry, young man, and I--" Suddenly he threw back his head and opened his mouth. He looked as if he were roaring with laughter, but he did not utter a sound. "Jimmie!" he exclaimed in a moment. "Lord! Am I glad you're here! Been expecting you for weeks!"

  Jimmie found himself resuming the smile he had worn on the train, coming home.

  "Hello, Mr. Corinth. I'm glad to see you. I read in a journal something about what you've been doing here, and when Washington tapped my superiors for some chemists I sai
d I'd go and I suggested going here. I didn't want to leave much, though."

  Mr. Corinth's eyes were less opaque. "Naturally."

  "I thought I ought to. London finally cabled the State Department. They talked to the moguls. I was in a plane for Lisbon a day later. What's on the fire?"

  The old man rubbed his face with both hands and looked through his fingers.

  "You could be an agent, eh? Walking in cold. You could--Jimmie, if I didn't remember the Hallowe'en you broke the windows in my chicken coop and I caught you redhanded!

  You still do look impish, in a conservative way." He laughed silently again. "I was sure proud when you won the chemistry prize in Oxford! Almost tried to hire you then. Seems a long time ago, eh? And that paper you just wrote was a peach!" He paused and said quietly, "How are they doing, Jimmie?"

  The young man answered, "All right."

  "No better than that?"

  "Maybe, a little. It's not easy--on just plain people."

  "Jimmie, who isn't--just plain people?"

  The homecoming smile became a shade rueful. "Well, I guess my folks aren't--

  any more. We've put on the dog, Mr. Corinth. About Saint Bernard size, it looks like."

  "Willie," the other man answered.

  "Willie?"

  "Call me Willie. My wife does. Half the chemists in America do. Anybody who can write about using isotopes the way you did can automatically call me Willie. You're Jimmie--and I'm Willie. Mm. I can imagine your folks are--a shock." He shrugged. "I'll show you through the shop tomorrow. Meantime, what's this I got in a letter practically dunked in sealing wax about you working on an incendiary that will stick to whatever it hits?"

  Jimmie pulled his chair forward. They began to talk. Only a few thousand men in the whole of America would have understood everything that they said. The five-o'clock shift went home. The bright yellow smoke paled against the darkling sky. Lights came on--Willie Corinth impatiently jerked on his bluish one in the middle of something about a gas-driven torpedo motor that would stand being dropped from forty thousand feet onto the hard sea. At last Jimmie looked at his watch and flushed.