The Other Horseman Read online

  Material luxury doesn't postulate eternal, world-wide luxury for the human spirit--even if the advertisers and the popular psychologists try to persuade us of it. I could do without the philosophy of looking on the bright side. Too damned blinding. You can't see the reaching shadows till the claws they stem from have you by the throat--if you're a 'bright-side looker,' a 'keep smiling' idiot, a self-pronounced optimist. No attitude means anything unless it jells with the facts. Or unless it is transmitted into action that changes facts. We try to maintain attitudes without action, and irrespective of fact. What we need is the critical attitude. A reverence for skilled iconoclasm, a recognition of the values on the dark side. Yeah, Jimmie, I sometimes wish the bombs would drop."

  Jimmie shrugged. "I remember one morning, in a little mess of rubble, in London.

  There was a kid--a girl about ten--with her mother, ambling about meaninglessly and looking at everything. The child's mother was out on her feet. But not the youngster. She talked to me--about the scene. She said, 'The trouble with death is, it's so-- soiling.'"

  Mr. Corinth winced slightly. "Mmm. And life is soiling, too, Jimmie. You've got to keep scrubbing your brains and your soul. One bath doesn't cleanse a man for a lifetime. That's the trouble with conversion." The old man smiled gently and changed the subject without altering his expression or his tone: "How's Audrey?"

  Jimmie jumped. "I dunno. Haven't seen her since day after I arrived."

  The corners of the old man's eyes crinkled. "She sure must have made a big impression, anyhow, to be avoided for so long!"

  "Funny way to figure."

  "Is it? I'll tell you how to figure. First, figure out how you feel. Then, what you think. Next, figure the opposite of both. Finally, integrate the whole business. At that point you get an answer. There's not an idea that hasn't a true opposite. There's not a human feeling that doesn't set up the possibility· of its opposite. There's not an act you can perform without instituting the potentiality of performing an opposite act. Newton's law of action and reaction applies in the brain and in the soul. It applies to history as much as shotguns. Who you are in the end is entirely a matter of what choices you make between constant opposites. Applying the law, I guess that if you haven't seen Audrey she is important to you. I could be wrong if I didn't know she was important, the first time."

  Jimmie considered. "She mailed me all her diaries," he said, finally, in an uncertain tone.

  Mr. Corinth looked at him for a moment, and he threw back his head in a spasm of his soundless laughter. "What a woman! Have you read 'em yet?"

  "Of course not!"

  "I accept the 'not' and reject the 'of course.' I asked you to examine the lady without reference to her dazzling exterior. Impressed by your exterior--or something--she has tendered you an unparalleled opportunity to do that very thing. You, however, have ignored the chance, and probably hidden the diaries someplace."

  Jimmie grinned. "I'll read 'em tonight."

  "Nope. You'll bring them here, and I'll read them."

  Jimmie shook his head. "That wasn't in the contract."

  "I have her permission."

  "You have!"

  "Yeah. She phones me every day."

  "Phones you!"

  "To ask how you are."

  "Good Lord!"

  The old man laughed again. "There's one thing I now discern about Audrey. She is determined. She is as mulish and persevering as her father--a man you ought to meet, incidentally. One can only hope, in the case of an overweaning spirit like Audrey's, that it will be oriented towards good causes."

  Jimmie shook his head helplessly.

  Mr. Corinth looked at his watch--a monstrous contraption that stuffed his pocket like a goose egg. "I'll have one of my truck drivers run you up to your house for the diaries. By the time you get back your lab ought to be habitable again."

  CHAPTER VIII

  JIMMIE RODE to his home in the front seat of a pick-up truck, with a driver who chewed a toothpick and talked with enthusiasm and detail about State's chances in the Conference. It was a long time--an age, an era--back to the days when Jimmie had thought about football. He did not know the names of the State players any more; he did not understand the rules by which the game was now played. But he made the seedy youth's eyes bug out by saying, "I'll have to see some games. I played for State once.

  Won my letter. At end. My brother too. Biff Bailey."

  The man said, "My Lord, you aren't Biff Bailey's brother!" Jimmie laughed and pointed out the house. The truck stopped and he loped up the walk. Westcott was sweeping the porch. The front door yawned. So Jimmie went through it, in long, silent bounds, and up the stairs to his room. He threw the door open.

  Sarah was lying on his bed, reading. Reading a gilt-edged, leather-bound book.

  There were two piles of such books--equal-sized piles--on the counterpane beside her.

  The bolster propped her head. She had kicked off her pumps. Her feet were lifted in the air and twisting. Her cheeks had a high, red sheen and her eyes glittered. She did not even look up when the door opened. She said, tensely, "Come in, Mother. I've found something priceless!"

  Jimmie felt his face blanch, as if his blood were heavy and the weight of it had dropped down into his belly and turned into iron.

  "Come in! It's--!" Sarah looked.

  Jimmie went in and turned and closed the door.

  The swift-changing complexion of her thoughts was in her eyes. Shock, fear, a search for an alibi, and the discovery of one. Then a short struggle for self-mastery. "I was cleaning out the closets! I found these! You can't expect a girl to resist such a temptation."

  He said nothing.

  "How did you get them?" Her blue eyes were certain, now. She interpreted his silence as guilty panic.

  "What else did you find?"

  "Oh, when I snoop I'm thorough! I found a picture of an English girl. You could tell she was English a mile away--by her bad clothes. Sloppy. I made the obvious mental note that she resembled our Audrey--the author, here. Quite a bit. She's like a dowdy, spiritual Audrey. Who is she?"

  "And what else?"

  "Nothing. I found these and I started reading. I don't think any novel I ever read was half as--as absorbing. Of course, I know a good many of the characters. That makes a difference. In fact, one or two of them were courting me--in a nice way--when they were courting Audrey, or vice versa--in a way that isn't quite so nice. It's all very interesting--

  and disillusioning. I rather thought I knew my stuff in this village. I begin to realize, though, that I'm a piddling amateur!"

  "How long have you been reading?"

  "All morning."

  Jimmie sat down in a chair beside his bed. He looked out of his window at the street. The truck driver was lolling in his seat with his feet propped on the windshield.

  Jimmie kept his voice calm. "I assume that you have concluded Audrey is rather a—well-

  -"

  Sarah smiled. "She is--rather!"

  "I see."

  "On the other hand--" Sarah sat up, after folding over the corner of a page in the diary--"well, a psychiatrist would be interested in her. She's ruthless. She's unconventional--to put it meagerly. She does as she pleases. She isn't mean, exactly, although she's hurt a lot of people in a big way. She seems to be sort of trying to find out something. That is, she seemed to be when she was eighteen and up through now--when she's twenty. She doesn't mind how hard she has to try, or what trying involves, or even being hurt, herself. She's got nerve. Boy! What a nerve!"

  "The search for happiness," Jimmie said remotely.

  "Happiness? I wouldn't interpret it that way. I don't think she gives a damn about being happy. Not in the cake and candy and comfort sense. She wants to be what she calls, 'in the groove,' doesn't she? The times when she said she was weren't necessarily comfortable times for her, were they? Don't tell me you haven't read these things!"

  "No. I haven't read them."

  "But they must have bee
n here last night--"

  "They've been here for a week or more."

  "And you haven't read them!" Sarah laughed and stopped herself. "That's a new high in something! What'd you do--steal 'em?"

  "She sent them to me."

  "Sent--" The girl's voice broke. "Sent them to you!"

  "Unh."

  "She sent them to you? She must be crazier than writing all this even would indicate."

  Jimmie sighed lightly. "I dunno. Naturally."

  "But why? Why? Some kind of advertisement? Some way of showing you that--

  but any man with half a pair of eyes could see that gilded fireball was--! I don't get it!"

  "I'm sorry you found those books."

  "I'm not. Not by a long way! I'll remember this morning as about tops in my eighteen years!" Sarah's eyes narrowed. "Jimmie, tell me. You aren't one of those--well--I was a kid when you left here. I worshiped you, and you never noticed--and all that. But I never knew anything about you, really. You aren't one of those fabulous, innocent people, are you?"

  He raised an eyebrow. "Innocent?"

  "Oh, don't sit there being English with me! You make me awfully impatient about less important things than this! You might as well tell me a little truth, for once. After all-

  -" Sarah's expression was cunning--"I've got the goods on you, haven't I?"

  Jimmie did not stir. He felt his heart lunge. But his blood came out of his iron viscera again. He knew anger--the insatiable, endless kind of anger, righteous and implacable, the kind of anger that is the shield of the world. "I don't get that, sis."

  "Don't get it?" The girl was deeply apprehensive again. His color had changed and his face was different. His voice was the same. She had thought for a little while that she had found the key to Jimmie, that he was not just a silent and determined person but, underneath, a weak and uncertain one. She was suddenly less sure about that. Her own fear--her conscience and her anxiety--moved her to a jittery assertiveness. "Of course you do! If Audrey sent you this--this--case history, it means she's been simply utterly stunned by you in some perverse way. That means, she's in a position that's simply too utterly vulnerable! And so are you, because you're much too genteel to let her suffer from the fact that you left her intimate papers lying around!"

  "How do you mean--suffer?"

  "Don't try to intimidate me with that chill! You know how! If I started to let out just even a few little paragraphs of what's in these books--! Boy! The blast would go across Muskogewan like a hurricane! Houses would fall in. Families would scatter.

  Strong men would take cover. Mothers and daughters would go barging around with their fingernails filed into hooks!"

  "But, Sarah, you don't propose to do that."

  "It all depends. All I said was, I had the goods on you. Now--and for all time!

  You understand that. I don't know what I want. Not anything, especially, now. You might be nicer to a few of my friends. I don't care about mothers and fathers, but the way you cut some of my crowd the one time you went to the club--well, it was humiliating to me."

  "Just an amiable little social blackmail, Sarah? Is that all?"

  "No, it's not all! 'All'--is whatever I want. Whatever. And whenever. Since I have got the whiphand over you by a miracle--and it's just plain justice, for once in my life--I might as well do a job of straightening you out! For one thing, it's time you stopped telling Father what for. He's a banker, and a business man, with a lot of knowledge a chemist simply couldn't have. He's widely read and he has powerful friends. You've just been sitting in some dingy English lab watching a bunch of clucks suffer under bombing-

  -so you take a sentimental viewpoint about the whole world! I must say, it gets my goat!"

  Jimmie's lips twitched faintly. "That, too. You're going to take away my freedom of speech."

  "I'll do better. I'll make you retract what you said." Sarah walked over and half sat on the windowsill. She leaned toward her brother; her expression was a mixture of unholy rapture and plain savagery. "I think, for instance, that it would be terribly nice if you joined the America Forever Committee. I'd like to see you make a few speeches, even, against helping win this war. You surely must have seen some things, if you look back honestly, that make you realize that some people in England don't like America and would enjoy seeing America crushed."

  "Oh, several. Several."

  "I take it, then, you'll join?" Even Sarah's voice showed a sort of incredulity over the apparently absolute collapse of her brother's morale. "Mother will be so happy! I'll be so--amused. I did look forward to your return, Jimmie--with a terrible longing. A pretty nearly crazy expectancy. When it turned out that you were just a--a snot, I couldn't bear it. That's what makes revenge so sweet."

  Jimmie had stood more than enough.

  He had led his sister on by a quietness that had suggested subjugation. He had wanted to see how far and how deep her malice would go. Now that he knew, his rage was explicit. He had to stop Sarah, at any cost. Any. That was the one fact upon which he must act.

  Audrey had put her whole life in his hands--against his will and without his knowledge--but he had accepted the trust by the mere retention of the diaries. He could have sent them back. He had not sent them back.

  Sarah had read them--or some of them. Black-haired, blue, blistering-eyed Sarah.

  And Sarah was going to use her stolen information as a bludgeon, a dagger, an eternal wellspring of power and black laughter. That was her scheme. To be so willing, so eager to torture, she must have been tortured herself, first. Jimmie did not know by whom or by what--and there was no time to find out. Sarah was dangerous as she sat there--crouched, almost--in front of him. The danger had to be met.

  "I couldn't persuade you," Jimmie said, after a moment, and not looking at his sister, "that what you intend to do is pretty scurvy? It's blackmail, you know. Besides, how can I tell that you won't do what other blackmailers have done? How can I tell that you won't, someday, just hint to Audrey, say--or Audrey's mother--that you know all about these diaries? How can I be sure that you won't go on clubbing people to gain small advantages for yourself?"

  Sarah said, "You're really weak, aren't you, Jimmie? You can't tell what I'm going to do! That's your misfortune. All you can be sure of is--that you've got to knuckle under."

  "You wouldn't do the decent thing? I mean, just forget you ever saw those books?

  Erase it from your mind? Lock it all up? Never mention it to anybody? Never show a trace of the effect of what you have found out? You couldn't feel ashamed you read 'em and do the sporting thing of--skipping it?"

  "I suppose you would," she said acidly.

  "I think so. And I think you will, Sarah."

  She laughed shortly. "You do? Why?"

  "Because I say so."

  She laughed again. "You say so and I just--obey. Is that it?"

  "Yes. That's it." Jimmie stood up. He was pale again. He towered over his sister.

  His lean shoulders stooped down. His eyes looked into hers. "You're eighteen. You're adult. I'm not going to lecture you about right and wrong, good and evil. Maybe you wouldn't understand if I did. But you do seem to understand power and violence. So I'm just going to threaten you, Sarah. By threaten, I mean I am going to make a holy pledge to you that I'd follow to the end of time, at any cost and at all costs. My pledge is about you--in the event that you ever do in any way use the knowledge you now have."

  Sarah did not like what she saw in his eyes--a shadow, a gleam, roving together behind the steady pupils, implacable as death. Nevertheless, she managed to laugh again.

  "You can't scare me, Jimmie. Not now you can't, and you know it!"

  "I can scare you," he answered. He took hold of her arm, halfway between her wrist and her elbow. She tried to twist away. His fingers came down like machinery. She gasped and bit her lip. He relaxed his grip and went on. "I am going to scare you now, Sarah, and you will stay scared--because you are going to know what I mean--and you are going to kn
ow that I am not bluffing. I have learned, by watching others learn, that nothing matters in this life except integrity. In this case, we can call it honor. That is the one precious thing. My work--what I am trying to do--is very important to the honor of the world. It is not any more important, however, than my own integrity to myself. That, in fact, comes first, because everything else in the world is founded on it."

  "Let go! You said you weren't going to lecture me! You're hurting!"

  "I've seen a great many people die, Sarah. People of all ages. They died haphazardly--but all of them in the line of maintaining honor. In the same cause I am no longer afraid to take the same punishment--and I am not afraid to dish it out. Do you understand that?"

  The girl blanched. "Jimmie! That's insane! Let--go!"

  "Have you forgotten you read those diaries, Sarah?"

  She writhed and tugged. "Let go! You'll make marks on me! Just because you can torture me this minute, doesn't help you. When you let go, I'll do it sooner--and worse!"

  He forced her to her feet and pushed her back on the bed. She tried, suddenly, to rake his face. He slapped her with his free hand. Sarah shuddered but she did not cry. He held her on the edge of the bed; his fingers grew tighter and tighter, slowly, while he talked. "You have just made a perfect, small-scale example of the hideous thing that has come alive all over the world, Sarah. The corrupt use of force. And I can see what must be done to crush it. I can see now why decent people so passionately detested to take the step. And you will have to see that I have learned how to take it. I am ashamed of us all, that this is necessary." He paused. His voice was solemn. "Sarah, if you breathe a word of this business, I will kill you."

  She began losing her nerve. She forgot the pain in her arm. She met his eye with unstable hostility. "You'd be hung for it!"

  He shook his head slowly. "I'm a chemist, Sarah. In the business of killing. I could kill you any time, anywhere, a hundred ways--painfully or quickly--and no one could find me for it. I want you to know that I will do this. And I want you to know, also, that I would not hesitate, even if I knew I'd hang."