"Amen," said Opal.

There followed a drawling antiphonal recitative that related the Gerlash situation. In the winter, they lived in a town called Hoxie, Arkansas, where Evangelist Gerlash clerked in the Buttorf drugstore and preached and baptized on the side. ("Hoxie may be only a wide space in the road," said Opal, "but she don't have any homely mountains.") Mrs. Gerlash, whom Abraham had untimely gathered to his bosom the winter before, had been a hymn singer and an organ player and had done a little preaching herself. Opal, here, had got the word the day she was born, and by the time she was five and a half years old she could preach to a fare-thee-well against the Catholics and the Wets. She was also an A-i dowser and was renowned throughout the Wonder State. In the summer, they took to the road as soon as Opal was out of school, and went camping and preaching and praying (and dowsing if there was a call for it) and spreading the truth all over the country. Last year, they had gone through the Middle West up as far as Chicago (here Opal, somewhat to her father's impatience, digressed to tell me the story of Mrs. O'Leary's cow), and the year before they had gone through New England; on earlier trips they had covered Florida and Georgia. One of these days, they were going to set up shop in New York City, though they understood the tourist-camp situation there

A Reading Problem (333

was poor. Sometimes they found hospitality and sometimes they didn't, depending on the heathens per capita. Sometimes the Christian citizens lent them a hall, and they put up a sign on the front door saying, "The Bible Tabernacle." Often, in such a receptive community, they were invited to supper and given groceries by the believers. But sometimes they had to do their saving of souls in a public park or in a tourist camp. ("Not much business in this one," said Opal, gazing ruefully at their solitary tent.) Mr. Buttorf, the druggist in Hoxie, always said he wasn't going to keep Gerlash one more day if he didn't quit this traipsing around three months of the year, but the Lord saw to it that right after Labor Day Buttorf came to his senses and hired him again. They had arrived in Adams this morning, and if they found fertile ground, they meant to stay a week, sowing the seeds of righteousness. Evangelist Gerlash would be much obliged to learn from me what sort of town this was; he said he guessed nobody could give him the lay of the land—spiritually speaking—any better than a Bible-reading girl like me.

"But first," he said, "tell Opal and I a little something about yourself, sister." He took a black notebook out of the pocket of his black coat and took a stubby pencil out of his hatband, licked it, and began to ask me questions. All the time he was taking down my dossier, Opal rocked gently back and forth, hugging herself and humming "Holy, Holy, Holy." I was much impressed by her, because her jaws, as she diligently chewed her gum, were moving in the opposite direction to her trunk; I was sure she would be able to pat her head and rub her stomach at the same time.

It never occurred to me that I didn't have to answer questions put to me by adults (except for the old men in the Gold-moor, who were not serious)—even strange ones who had dropped out of nowhere. Besides, I was always as cooperative as possible with clergymen, not knowing when my number might come up. The evangelist's questions were harmless enough, but some of them were exceedingly strange. In between asking my name and my age and my father's occupation, he would say, "Which do you think is the Bible Sabbath—Saturday or Sunday?" and "Do

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you know if the Devil is a bachelor or is he a married man?" When to these hard, interesting questions I replied that I did not know, Opal left off her humming and said, "Amen."

When he had got from me all the data he wanted, he said, "I bet you this here town is a candidate for brimstone. I bet you it's every bit as bad as that one out on the plains we were at for two weeks in a hall. Heathens they were, but scared, so they give us a hall. That Mangol."

"Mudhole is what I call it," said Opal.

Her father chuckled. "Opal makes jokes," he explained. Then he said, "That was the worst town we come across in all our travels, sister, and somewheres on me I've got a clipping from the Mangol daily showing what I told the folks down there. I wouldn't be surprised if the same situation was here in Adams, being in the same state with Mangol and not any too far away from Mangol and having that college that is bound to sow free-thinking. Forewarned is forearmed is what I always say. I may have a good deal of hard work to do here." He began to fish things out of his pockets, and you never saw such a mess—a knife, a plug of chewing tobacco, a thin bar of soap, envelopes with arithmetic on them, a handkerchief I am not going to describe, any number of small pamphlets and folded-up handbills. Finally, he handed me a clipping. It said,

ANOTHER SOUR, GASSY STOMACH

VICTIM SAYS GASTRO-PEP

GAVE RELIEF

There was a picture of an indignant-looking man with a pointed head and beetling brows and a clenched jaw, who testified:

"For 3 years I had been a Great Victim of stomach gas and indigestion," said Mr. Homer Wagman, prominent Oklahoma citizen of 238 Taos Street, Muskogee. "My liver was sluggish, I would get bloated up and painful and had that tired dragged out feeling all the time. Recently a friend told me about Gastro-Pep so I decided to give it a trial. After taking 3 bottles of this medicine my WHOLE SYSTEM has gone through such a change that I can hardly believe itl Now my gas and stomach discomfort are

A Reading Problem {H5

relieved and I can eat my meals without suffering. I sleep like a schoolboy." Advt.

I did not know what I was reading, but I didn't like it anyway, since it had so nasty a sound; I didn't mind hearing about broken legs or diphtheria, but I hated any mention of anyone's insides. I started to read it for the second time, trying to think of something intelligent or complimentary to say to Evangelist Gerlash, and I must have made a face, because he leaned over me, adjusting his glasses, and said, "Oops! Hold onl Wrong write-up," and snatched the clipping out of my hand. I'm not absolutely sure, but I think Opal winked at me. Her father shuffled through his trash again and finally handed me another clipping, which, this time, was not an advertisement. The headline was

GERLASH LOCATES HELL IN HEART OF CITY OF MANGOL

and the story beneath it ran:

"Hell is located right in the heart of the city of Mangol but will not be in operation until God sets up His Kingdom here in the earth," declared Evangelist Gerlash last night to another capacity crowd in the Bible Tabernacle.

"There are some very bad trouble spots in the city of Mangol that no doubt would be subjects of Hell right now," continued the evangelist and said, "but there are so many good people and places in this city that overshadow the bad that God has decided to postpone Hell in Mangol until the time of the harvest and the harvest, God says, 'is the end of the world' (Matthew 13:39).

"Hell, when started by God with eternal fire that comes from God out of Heaven and ignites the entire world, including this city, will be an interesting place. It will be a real play of fireworks, so hot that all the elements of earth will melt; too hot all over to find a place for any human creature to live. God is not arranging this fireworks for any human creature and therefore, if you or I ever land in this place, it is because we choose to go there."

Evangelist Gerlash and his daughter, Opal Gerlash, 12, of Hoxie, Arkansas, have been preaching on alternate nights for the

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last week at the Bible Tabernacle, formerly the Alvarez Feed and Grain store, at 1919 Prospect Street. Tonight Opal Gerlash will lecture on the subject, "Are You Born Again by Jumping, Rolling, Shouting, or Dancing?"

I read this with a good deal more interest than I had read of Mr. Wagman's renascence, although as Evangelist Gerlash's qualifications multiplied, my emotion waned. I had assumed from the headline, which made the back of my neck prickle, that he had some hot tips on the iniquities of that flat, dull little prairie town of Mangol that now and again we drove through when we were taking a trip to the southwest; the only thing I had ever noticed about it was that I had to hold my nose as we went through it, because the smell of sugar beets was so powerfully putrid. The city of Mangol had a population of about six hundred.

Nevertheless, though the evangelist did not scare or awe me, I had to be polite, and so, handing back the clipping, I said, "When do you think the end of the world is apt to be?" Opal had stopped her humming and swaying, and both she and her father were staring at me with those fierce brown eyes.

"In the autumn of the world," said Evangelist Gerlash sepulchrally, and Opal said, as she could be counted on to do, "Amen."

"Yeah, I know," I said. "But what autumn? What year?" He and Opal simultaneously bowed their heads in silent prayer. Both of them thoughtfully chewed gum.

Then Opal made a speech. "The answer to this and many other questions will be found in Evangelist Gerlash's inspirational hundred-and-twelve-page book entitled Gerlash on the Bible. Each and every one of you will want to read about the seven great plagues to smite the people of the world just before the end. Upon who will they fall? Have they begun? What will it mean to the world? In this book, on sale for the nominal sum of fifty cents or a half dollar, Evangelist Gerlash lets the people in on the ground floor regarding the law of God." From one of the deep sleeves of her kimono—for that was what that grimy garment was—Opal withdrew a paper-bound book with a picture of her father on the front of it, pointing his finger at me.

A Reading Problem (337

"Fifty cents, a half dollar," said the author, "which is to say virtually free, gratis, and for nothing."

Up the creek a way, a bullfrog made a noise that sounded distinctly like "Ger-lash."

"What makes Mangol so much worse than any place else?" I asked, growing more and more suspicious now that the conversation had taken so mercantile a turn.

But the Gerlashes were not giving out information free. "You will find the answer to this and many other questions in the book," said Opal. "Such as 'Can Wall Street run God's Business?' "

"Why does the Devil go on a sit-down strike for a thousand years?" said her father.

"What?" said I.

"Who will receive the mark of the beast?" said Opal.

"Repent!" commanded Evangelist Gerlash. "Watch! Hearken!"

"Ger-lash," went the bullfrog.

"Will hell burn forever?" cried Opal. "Be saved from the boiling pits! Take out insurance against spending eternity on a griddle!"

"Thy days are numbered," declared her father.

Opal said, "Major Hagedorn, editor of the Markston Standard, in his editorial said, 'This man Gerlash is as smart as chain lightning and seems to know his Bible forwards and backwards.' " All this time, she was holding up the book, and her father, on the cover of it, was threatening to impale me on his accusing finger.

"Perhaps our sister doesn't have the wherewithal to purchase this valuable book, or in other words the means to her salvation," he said, at last, and gave me a look of profound sadness, as if he had never been so sorry for anyone in his life. I said it was true I didn't have fifty cents (who ever heard of anyone ten years old going around with that kind of money?), and I offered to trade my Bible for Gerlash on the Bible, since I was interested in finding out whether the Devil was a bachelor or had a wife. But he shook his head. He began to throttle his beard again, and he said, "Does a dove need a kite? Does a giraffe need a neck? Does an Eskimo need a fur coat? Does Gerlash need a Bible?"

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COWBOYS AND INDIANS, AND MAGIC MOUNTAINS

"Gerlash is a regular walking encyclopedia on the Bible," said Opal.

"One of the biggest trouble spots in the world is Mangol, Colorado," said Evangelist Gerlash. "No reason to think for a minute the contamination won't spread up here like a plague of locusts. Don't you think you had ought to be armed, Christian soldier?"

"Yes, I do," I said, for I had grown more and more curious. "But I don't have fifty cents."

"Considering that you are a Christian girl and a Bible reader," said the man, "I think we could make a special price for you. I reckon we could let you have it for twenty-five cents. O.K., Opal?"

Opal said rapidly, "Gastro-Pep contains over thirty ingredients. So it is like taking several medicines at once. And due to the immense volume in which it sells, the price of Gastro-Pep is reasonable, so get it now. Tonight!"

Evangelist Gerlash gave his daughter a sharp look. And, flustered, she stammered, "I mean, owing to the outstanding nature of Gerlash's information, the price of this invaluable book is a mere nothing. The truth in this book will stick and mark you forever."

"You want this book bad, don't you, sister Emily Vander-pool?" asked her father. "You are a good girl, and good girls are entitled to have this book, which is jam-packed with answers to the questions that have troubled you for years. You can't tell me your mammy and pappy are so mean that they wouldn't give their little girl a quarter for Gerlash on the Bible. Why don't you skedaddle over to home and get the small sum of twenty-five cents off your Christian ma?" He opened his notebook and checked my address. "Over to 126 Belleview Avenue."

"I'm hungry," said Opal. "I could eat me a horse."

"Never mind you being hungry," said her father, with a note of asperity in his mushy voice. "Don't you doubt me, sister Vanderpool," he went on, "when I tell you your innocent life is in danger. Looky here, when I got a call to go and enlighten the children of darkness in Mangol, just down the line from here, I got that call like a clap of thunder and I knew I couldn't waste no time. I went and I studied every den of vice in the city limits and some outside the city limits. It's bad, sister. For twenty-five

A Reading Problem (239

cents, you and your folks can be prepared for when the Man-golites come a-swarming into this town." He glanced again at his notebook. "While you're getting the purchase price of my book, please ask your pure-hearted mother if I might have the loan of her garage to preach the word of God in. Are you folks centrally located?"

"My brother's got his skunk skins drying in it," I said. "You couldn't stand the smell."

"Rats!" said Evangelist Gerlash crossly, and then sternly he said, "You better shake a leg, sister. This book is offered for a limited time only."

"I can't get a quarter," I said. "I already owe her twenty cents."

"What're you going to have for supper?" asked Opal avidly. "I could eat a bushel of roasting ears. We ain't had a meal in a dog's age—not since that old handout in Niwot."

"Alas, too true," said her father. "Do you hear that, my sister Emily? You look upon a hungry holy man of God and his girl who give to the poor and save no crust for himself. Fainting for the want of but a crumb from the rich man's groaning board, we drive ourself onwards, bringing light where there is darkness and comfort where there is woe. Perhaps your good Christian mother and father would give us an invite to their supper tonight, in exchange for which they and theirs would gladly be given this priceless book, free of charge, signed by hand."

"Well, gosh," I said, working my tennis shoes on over my wet socks, "I mean . . . Well, I mean I don't know."

"Don't know what?" said that great big man, glowering at me over the tops of his severe spectacles. "Don't you go and tell me that a good Bible-reading girl like you has got kin which are evolutionists and agnostics and infidels who would turn two needy ministers of God away from their door. To those who are nourished by the Law of the Lord, a crust now and then is sufficient to keep body and soul together. I don't suppose Opal and I have had hot victuals for a good ten days, two weeks." A piteous note crept into his versatile voice, and his brown eyes and his daughter's begot a film of tears. They did look awfully hungry, and I felt guilty the way I did when I was eating a sandwich and Reddie was looking up at me like a martyr of old.

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"Didn't she say her daddy ran a grocery store?" asked Opal, and her father, consulting my vital statistics, smiled broadly.

"There's nothing the matter with your ears, Opie," he said. And then, to me, "How's about it, sister? How's about you going down to this Safeway store and getting Opal and I some bread and some pork chops and like that?"

"Roasting ears," said Opal. "And a mushmelon."

It had suddenly occurred to me that if I could just get up and run away, the incident would be finished, but Evangelist Gerlash was clairvoyant, and, putting two firmly restraining hands on my shoulders and glaring at me straight in the eye, he said, "We don't have a thing in the world tonight to do but show up at 125 Belleview Avenue round about suppertime."

"I'd rather cook out," said Opal. "I'd rather she brought the groceries." Her father bent his head into his hands, and there was a great sob in his voice when he said, "I have suffered many a bitter disappointment in this vale of tears, but I suppose the bitterest is right now here in Adams, Colorado, where, thinking I had found a child of light, she turned out to be a mocker, grinding under her heel shod in gold the poor and the halt. Oh, sister, may you be forgiven on the Day of Judgment!"

"Whyn't you go get us some eats?" said Opal, cajoling. "If you get us some eats, we won't come calling. If we come calling, like as not we'll spend the night."

"Haven't slept in a bed since May," said her father, snuffling.

"We don't shake easy," said Opal, with an absolutely shameless grin.

My mother had a heart made of butter, and our spare room was forever occupied by strays, causing my father to scold her to pieces after they'd gone, and I knew that if the Gerlashes showed up at our house (and plainly they would) with their hard-luck story and their hard-luck looks and all their devices for saving souls, she would give them houseroom and urge them to stay as long as they liked, and my father would not simmer down for a month of Sundays.

So I got up and I said, "All right, I'll go get you a sack of groceries." I had a nebulous idea that my father might let me

A Reading Problem (341

buy them on time or might give me a job as a delivery boy until I had paid for them.

To my distress, the Gerlashes got up, too, and the evangelist said, "We'll drive you down to Main Street, sister, and sit outside, so there won't be no slip-up."

"It's Saturday!" I cried. "You can't find a place to park."

"Then we'll just circle round and round the block."

"But I can't get into a car with strangers," I protested.

"Strangers!" exclaimed Evangelist Gerlash. "Why, sister, we're friends now. Don't you know all about Opal and I? Didn't we lay every last one of our cards on the table right off the bat?" He took my arm in his big, bony hand and started to propel me in the direction of the Ford, and just then, like the Mounties to the rescue, up came Mr. Starbird's official car, tearing into the campgrounds and stopping, with a scream from the brakes, right in front of me and the Gerlashes. A man in a deputy's uniform was in the front seat beside him.

"Why, Emily," said Mr. Starbird as he got out of the car and pushed his hat back from his forehead. "I thought you went on home after that ruckus we had. You'll be glad to hear those scalawags are going off to the pen tomorrow, so you can come back to jail any time after 10 a.m."

Opal giggled, but her father shivered and looked as if a rabbit had just run over his grave. 'We're getting outa here," he said to her under his breath, and started at a lope toward his car.

"That's them all right," said the man in the deputy's uniform. "They set up shop in the feed store, and when they wasn't passing out mumbo-jumbo about the world going up in firecrackers, they was selling that medicine. Medicine! Ninety percent wood alcohol and ninety percent fusel oil. Three cases of jake-leg and God knows how many workers passed out in the fields."

Mr. Starbird and the deputy had closed in on the Gerlashes. Mr. Starbird said, "I don't want any trouble with you, mister. I just want you to get out of Adams before I run you out on a rail. We got plenty of our own preachers and plenty of our own bootleggers, and we don't need any extra of either one. Just kindly allow me to impound this so-called medicine and then

*F ?F COWBOYS AND INDIANS, AND MAGIC MOUNTAINS

you shove. What kind of a bill of goods were they trying to sell you, Emily, kid?"

The deputy said, "That's another of their lines. We checked on them after they left Mangol, checked all the way back to Arkansas. They get some sucker like a kid or an idiot and give them this spiel and promise they'll go to heaven if they'll just get them some grub or some money or my Aunt Geraldine's diamond engagement ring or whatever."

I said nothing. I was thrilled, and at the same time I was mortally embarrassed for the Gerlashes. I was sorry for them, too, because, in spite of their predicament, they looked more hungry than anything else.

Opal said, "If we went to jail, we could eat," but her father gave her a whack on the seat and told her, "Hush up, you," and the procession, including myself, clutching my Bible and Tom Sawyer Abroad, moved toward the tent and the Model T. The sheriff took two cases of medicine out of the tent and put them in his car, and then we stood there watching the Gerlashes strike camp and put all their bivouac gear into the trailer. They worked swiftly and competently, as if they were accustomed to sudden removals. When they were finished, Opal got into the front seat and started to cry. "God damn it to hell," said the child preacher. "Whyn't we ever have something to eat?"

Mr. Starbird, abashed by the dirty girl's tears, took out his wallet and gave her a dollar. "Don't you spend a red cent of it in Adams," he said. "You go on and get out of town and then get some food."

Evangelist Gerlash, having cranked the car, making a noise like a collision, climbed into the driver's seat, and grinned at the sight of the dollar. "I have cast my bread upon the waters and I am repaid one hundredfold," he said. "And you, in casting your bread upon the waters, you, too, will be repaid one hundredfold."

"Amen," said Opal, herself again, no longer crying.

"Now beat it," said Mr. Starbird.

"And give Mangol a wide berth," said the deputy.

The car shook as if it were shaking itself to death, and it coughed convulsively, and then it started up with a series of

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jerks and detonations, and disappeared in a screen of dust and black smoke.

Mr. Starbird offered to give me a lift home, and I got into the front seat beside him while the deputy from Mangol got in the back. On the way up the hill, Mr. Starbird kept glancing at me and then smiling.

"I've never known a girl quite like you, Emily," he said. "Memorizing the books of the Bible in the hoosegow, wearing a buck-private hat."

I blushed darkly and felt like crying, but I was pleased when Mr. Starbird went on to say, "Yes, sir, Emily, you're going to go places. What was the book you were reading down at my place when you were wearing your father's Masonic fez?" I grew prouder and prouder. "It isn't every girl of ten years of age who brushes up against some moonshiners with a record as long as your arm in the very same day that a couple of hillbilly fakers try to take her for a ride. Why, Emily, do you realize that if it hadn't of been for you, we might not have got rid of those birds till they'd set up shop and done a whole lot of mischief?"

"Really?" I said, not quite sure whether he was teasing me, and grinned, but did so looking out the window, so Mr. Starbird wouldn't see me.

Was I lucky that day I On the way home, I saw about ten people I knew, and waved and yelled at them, and when I was getting out in front of my house, Virgil Meade, with whom I had had an on-again off-again romance for some time and to whom I was not currently speaking, was passing by and he heard the sheriff say, "Come on down to jail tomorrow and we'll get some Dr. Pepper."

The sheriff's invitation gave me great prestige in the neighborhood, but it also put an end to my use of the jail as a library, because copycats began swarming to the courthouse and making so much racket in the waiting room that Mr. Starbird couldn't hear himself think, let alone follow Fu Manchu. And after a few weeks he had to post a notice forbidding anyone in the room except on business. Privately, he told me that he would just as lief let me read in one of the cells, but he was afraid word would

COWBOYS AND INDIANS, AND MAGIC MOUNTAINS

leak out and it might be bad for my reputation. He was as sorry, he said, as he could be.

He wasn't half as sorry as I was. The snake season was still on in the mountain; Mrs. Looby hated me; Aunt Joey was visiting, and she and Mother were using the living room to cut out Butterick patterns in; Stella had just got on to pig Latin and never shut her mouth for a minute. All the same, I memorized the books of the Bible and I won the New Testament, and I'll tell you where I did my work—in the cemetery, under a shady tree, sitting beside the grave of an infant kinswoman of the sheriff, a late-nineteenth-century baby called Primrose Starbird.

A Summer Day

He wore hot blue serge knickerbockers and a striped green shirt, but he had no shoes and he had no hat and the only things in his pants pockets were a handkerchief that was dirty now, and a white pencil from the Matchless Lumber Company, and a card with Mr. Wilkins' name printed on it and his own, Jim Little-field, written on below the printing, and a little aspirin box. In the aspirin box were two of his teeth and the scab from his vaccination. He had come on the train barefoot all the way from Missouri to Oklahoma, because his grandmother had died and Mr. Wilkins, the preacher, had said it would be nice out here with other Indian boys and girls. Mr. Wilkins had put him on the through train and given the nigger man in the coach half a dollar to keep an eye on him, explaining that he was an orphan and only eight years old. Now he stood on the crinkled cinders beside the tracks and saw the train moving away like a fast little fly, and although Mr. Wilkins had promised on his word of honor, there was no one to meet him.

There was no one anywhere. He looked in the windows of the yellow depot, where there was nothing but a fat stove and a bench and a tarnished spittoon and a small office where a telegraph machine nervously ticked to itself. A freshly painted handcar stood on a side track near the water tower, looking as if no one were ever going to get into it again. There wasn't a sound, there wasn't even a dog or a bee, and there was nothing to look at except the bare blue sky and, across the tracks, a field of stubble that stretched as far as year after next beyond a rusty barbed-wire fence. Right by the door of the depot, there was an oblong piece of tin, which, shining in the sun, looked cool, although, of course, Jim knew it would be hot enough to bite your

f

*Sp V* COWBOYS AND INDIANS, AND MAGIC MOUNTAINS

foot. It looked cool because it made him think of how the rain water used to shine in the washtubs in Grandma's back yard. On washday, when he had drawn buckets of it for her, it would sometimes splash over on his feet with a wonderful sound and a wonderful feeling. After the washing was on the line, she would black the stove and scrub the kitchen floor, and then she would take her ease, drinking a drink of blood-red sassafras as she sat rocking on the porch, shaded with wisteria. At times like that, on a hot summer day, she used to smell as cool as the underside of a leaf.

There was nothing cool here, so far as you could see. The paint on the depot was so bright you could read the newspaper by it in the dark. Jim could not see any trees save one, way yonder in the stubble field, and it looked poor and lean. In Missouri, there were big trees, as shady as a parasol. He remembered how he had sat on the cement steps of the mortuary parlor in the shade of the acacias, crying for his grandmother, whom he had seen in her cat-gray coffin. Mr. Wilkins had lipped some snuff and consoled him, talking through his nose, which looked like an unripe strawberry. "I don't want to be no orphan," Jim had cried, thinking of the asylum out by the fairground, where the kids wore gray cotton uniforms and came to town once a week on the trolley car to go to the library. Many of them wore glasses and some of them were lame. Mr. Wilkins had said, "Landagoshen, Jim boy, didn't I say you were going to be Uncle Sam's boy? Uncle Sam don't fool with orphans, he only takes care of citizens." On the train, a fat man had asked him what he was going to be when he grew up and Jim had said, "An aborigine." The man had laughed until he'd had to wipe his round face with a blue bandanna, and the little girl who was with him had said crossly, "What's funny, Daddy? What did the child say?" It had been cool before that, when he and Mr. Wilkins were waiting under the tall maple trees that grew beside the depot in Missouri and Mr. Marvin Dannenbaum's old white horse was drinking water out of the moss-lined trough. And just behind them, on Linden Street, Miss Bessie Ryder had been out in her yard picking a little mess of red raspberries for her breakfast. The dew would have still been on them when she doused them good with cream. Over the front of her little house there

A Summer Day (347

was a lattice where English ivy grew and her well was surrounded by periwinkle.

But Jim could not remember any of that coolness when he went out of the shade of the maples into the coach. Mrs. Wilkins had put up a lunch for him; when he ate it later, he found a dead ant on one of the peanut-butter sandwiches and the Baby Ruth had run all over the knobby apple. His nose had felt swollen and he'd got a headache and the green seat was as scratchy as a brush when he lay down and put his cheek on it. The train had smelled like the Fourth of July, like punk and lady crackers, and when it stopped in little towns, its rest was uneasy, for it throbbed and jerked and hissed like an old dog too feeble to get out of the sun. Once, the nigger man had taken him into the baggage car to look at some kind of big, expensive collie in a cage, muzzled and glaring fiercely through the screen; there were trunks and boxes of every shape, including one large, round one that the nigger man said held nothing but one enormous cheese from Michigan. When Jim got back to his seat, the fat man with the little girl had bought a box lunch that was put on the train at Sedalia, and Jim had watched them eat fried chicken and mustard greens and beet pickles and pone. The next time the train stopped, the nigger man had collected the plates and the silverware and had taken them into the station.

Jim had made the train wheels say "Uncle Sam, Uncle Sam," and then he hadn't been able to make them stop, even when he was half asleep. Mr. Wilkins had said that Uncle Sam wasn't one of your fair-weather friends that would let a Cherokee down when all his kin were dead. It was a blessing to be an Indian, the preacher had said, and Mrs. Wilkins had said, "It surely is, Jim boy. I'd give anything to be an Indian, just anything you can name." She had been stringing wax beans when she'd said that, and the ham hock she would cook with them had already been simmering on the back of the stove. Jim had wanted to ask her why she would like to be an Indian, but she'd seemed to have her mind on the beans, so he'd said nothing and stroked the turkey wing she used for brushing the stove.

It was hot enough to make a boy sick here in this cinder place, and Jim did not know what he would do if someone did not come. He could not walk barefoot all the way back to Mis-

»

*W 9 COWBOYS AND INDIANS, AND MAGIC MOUNTAINS

souri; he would get lost if he did not follow the tracks, and if he did follow them and a train came when he was drowsy, he might get scooped up by the cowcatcher and be hurled to kingdom come. He sat on his heels and waited, feeling the gray clinkers pressing into his feet, listening to the noontime sleep. Heat waves trembled between him and the depot and for a long time there was no sound save for the anxious telegraph machine, which was saying something important, although no one would heed. Perhaps it was about him—Jim! It could be a telegram from Mr. Wilkins saying for them to send him back. The preacher might have found a relation that Jim could live with. The boy saw, suddenly, the tall, white colonnade of a rich man's house by the Missouri River; he had gone there often to take the brown bread and the chili sauce Grandma used to make, and the yellow-haired lady at the back door of the big house had always said, "Don't you want to rest a spell, Jimmy, here where it's cool?" He would sit on a bench at the long table and pet the mother cat who slept on the windowsill and the lady would say, "You like my old puss-in-boots, don't you? Maybe you'd best come and live with me and her, seeing that she's already got your tongue." Sometimes this lady wore a lace boudoir cap with a blue silk bow on the front, and once she had given him a button with a pin that said, "let's crack the Volstead act." The stubborn stutter of the machine could be a message from her, or maybe it was from Miss Bessie Ryder, who once had told his fortune with cards in a little room with pictures of Napoleon everywhere; the English ivy growing just outside made patterns on Napoleon's face, and in the little silver pitcher in the shape of Napoleon's head there was a blue anemone. Or it could be the Wilkinses themselves sending for him to come and live in the attic room, where there was the old cradle their baby had died in and a pink quilt on the bed with six-pointed stars.

Jim cried, catching his tears with his gentle tongue. Then, a long way off, a bell began to ring slowly and sweetly, and when it stopped, he heard an automobile coming with its bumptious cutout open. He went on crying, but in a different way, and his stomach thumped with excitement, for he knew it would be the people from the school, and suddenly he could not bear to have them find him. He ran the length of the depot and then ran

A Summer Day ( 349

back again, and then he hopped on one foot to the door and hopped on the piece of tin. He screamed with the awful, surprising pain. He sat down and seized his burned foot with both hands, and through his sobs he said, "Oh, hell on you, oh, Judas Priest!" He heard the car stop and the doors slam and he heard a lady say, "Wait a minute. Oh, it's all right." Jim shut his eyes as feet munched the cinders, closer and closer to him.

"Don't touch me!" he shrieked, not opening his eyes, and there was a silence like the silence after the district nurse in Missouri had looked down his throat. They did not touch him, so he stopped crying, and the lady said, "Why, the train must have come long ago! I will positively give that stationmaster a piece of my mind."

Jim opened his eyes. There was a big man, with very black hair, which fell into his face, wearing a spotted tan suit and a ring with a turquoise the size of a quarter. The woman had gold earrings and gold teeth, which she showed in a mechanical smile, and she wore a blue silk dress with white embroidery on the bertha. They both smelled of medicine. The man touched Jim on the arm where he had been vaccinated; baffled by everything in the world, he cried wildly. The woman bent down and said, "Well, well, well, there, there, there." Jim was half suffocated by the smell of medicine and of her buttery black hair. The man and woman looked at each other, and Jim's skin prickled because he knew they were wondering why he had not brought anything. Mr. Wilkins had said you didn't need to, not even shoes.

"Well, honey," said the lady, taking his hand, "we've come a long way all by our lonesome, haven't we?"

"A mighty long way," said the man, laughing heartily to make a joke of it. He took Jim's other hand and made him stand up, and then they started down the cinder path and around the corner of the depot to a tall, black touring car, which said on the door:

DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR INDIAN SERVICE

In the back seat there were two huge empty demijohns and a brand-new hoe.

^F *§F COWBOYS AND INDIANS, AND MAGIC MOUNTAINS

"Hop in front, sonny," said the man. The black leather seat scorched Jim's legs, and he put his hand over his eyes to shut out the dazzle of the windshield.

"No shoes," said the woman, getting in beside him.

"Already noted," said the man. He got in, too, and his fat thigh was dampish at Jim's elbow.

Jim worried about the telegraph machine. Would it go on until someone came to listen to it or would it stop after a while like a telephone? It must be about him, because he was the only one who had got off the train here, and it must be from someone saying to send him back, because there was nothing else it could be about. His heart went as fast as a bobbin being filled and he wanted to throw up and to hide and to cram a million grapes into his mouth and to chase a scared girl with a garter snake, all at once. He thought of screaming bloody murder so that they would let him get out of the car, but they might just whip him for that, whip him with an inner tube or beat him over the head with the new hoe. But he wouldn't stay at the school 1 If there was no other way, he would ride home on a freight car, like a hobo, and sleep in the belfry of the church under the crazy bell. He would escape tonight, he told himself, and he pressed his hand on his heart to make it quiet down.

From the other side of the depot, you could see the town. A wide street went straight through the level middle of it, and it had the same kind of stores and houses and lampposts that any other town had. The trees looked like leftovers, and the peaked brown dogs slinked behind the trash cans in an ornery way. The man started the car, and as they drove up the main street, Jim could tell that the men sitting on the curb were Indians, for they had long pigtails and closed-up faces. They sat in a crouch, with their big heads hanging forward and their flat-fingered hands motionless between their knees. The women who were not fat were as lean and spry as katydids, and all of them walked up and down the main street with baskets full of roasting ears on one arm and babies on the other. The wooden cupola on the red brick courthouse was painted yellow-green and in the yard men lay with their hats over their eyes or sat limply on the iron benches under the runty trees, whose leaves were gray with dust

A Summer Day (351

or lice. A few children with ice-cream cones skulked in the doorways, like abused cats. Everyone looked ailing.

The man from the school gestured with the hand that wore the heavy turquoise, and he said, "Son, this is your ancestors' town. This here is the capital of the Cherokee nation."

"You aren't forgetting the water, are you, Billings?" said the woman in a distracted way, and when the man said he was not, she said to Jim, "Do you know what 'Cherokee' means?" "No," said Jim.

The woman looked over his head at the man. "Goodness knows, we earn our bread. What can you do with Indians if they don't know they're Indians?"

"I always knew I was an Indian," said the man. "And so did I," said the woman. "Always." Jim sat, in this terrible heat and terrible lack of privacy, between their mature bodies and dared not even change the position of his legs, lest he hit the gearshift. He felt that they were both looking at him as if a rash were coming out on his face and he wished they would hurry and get to the school, so that he could start escaping. At the thought of running away after the sun was down and the animals and robbers started creeping in the dark, his heart started up again, like an engine with no one in charge.

The car stopped at a drugstore, and the man got out and heaved the demijohns onto the sidewalk. In the window of the store was a vast pink foot with two corn plasters and a bunion plaster. Next door was an empty building and on its window lights were pasted signs for J. M. Barclay's Carnival Show and for Copenhagen snuff and for Clabber Girl baking powder. The carnival sign was torn and faded, the way such signs always are, and the leg of a red-haired bareback rider was tattered shabbily. How hot a carnival would be, with the smell of dung and popcorn! Even a Ferris wheel on a day like this would be no fun. Awful as it was here, where the sun made a sound on the roof of the car, it would be even worse to be stuck in the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when something went wrong below. A boy would die of the heat and the fear and the sickness as he looked down at the distant ground, littered with disintegrated popcorn balls.

*!r *W COWBOYS AND INDIANS, AND MAGIC MOUNTAINS

The lady beside Jim took a handkerchief out of her white linen purse, and as she wiped the sweat away from her upper lip, he caught a delicate fragrance that made him think of the yellow-haired lady in Missouri and he said, "I want to write a letter as soon as I get there."

"Well, we'll see," the woman said. "Who do you want to write to?" But the man came back, so Jim did not have to answer. The man staggered, with his stomach pushed out, under the weight of the demijohn, and as he put it in the back seat, he said savagely, "I wish one of those fellers in Washington would have to do this a couple, three times. Then maybe the Department would get down to brass tacks about that septic tank."

"The Department!" ejaculated the woman bitterly.

The man brought the other jug of water, and they drove off again, coming presently to a highway that stretched out long and white, and as shining as the piece of tin at the depot. They passed an old farm wagon with a rocking chair in the back, in which a woman smaller and more withered than Jim's grandmother sat, smoking a corncob pipe. Three dark little children were sitting at her feet, lined up along one edge of the wagon with their chins on the sideboard, and they stared hard at the Indian Service car. The one in the middle waved timidly and then hid his head in his shoulder, like a bird, and giggled.

"Creeks!" cried the woman angrily. "Everywhere we see Creeks these days! What will become of the Cherokees?"

"Ask the boy what his blood is," said the man.

"Well, Jim," said the woman, "did you hear what Mr. Standing-Deer said?"

"What?" said Jim and turned convulsively to look at the man with that peculiar name.

"Do you remember your mother and father?" said the woman.

"No, they were dead."

"How did they die?"

"I don't know. Of the ague, maybe."

"He says they may have died of the ague," said the woman to Mr. Standing-Deer, as if he were deaf. "I haven't heard that word 'ague' for years. Probably he means flu. Do you think per-

A Summer Day ( 353

haps this archaism is an index to the culture pattern from which he comes?"

Mr. Standing-Deer made a doglike sound in his throat. "Ask me another," he said. "I don't care about his speech at this stage of the game—it's the blood I'm talking about."

"Were Mama and Daddy both Indians?" ask the woman kindly.

"I don't care!" Jim said. He had meant to say "I don't know," but he could not change it afterward, because he commenced to cry again so hard that the woman patted his shoulder and did not ask him any more questions. She told him that her name was Miss Hornet and that she had been born in Chickasha and that she was the little boys' dormitory matron and that Mr. Standing-Deer was the boys' counselor. She said she was sure Jim would like it at the school. "Uncle Sam takes care of us all just as well as he can, so we should be polite to him and not let him see that we are homesick," she said, and Jim, thinking of his getaway this night, said softly, "Yes'm, Mr. Wilkins already told me."

After a time they turned into a drive, at the end of which was a big, white gate. Beyond it lay terraced lawns, where trees grew beside a group of buildings. It was hushed here, too. In spots, the grass was yellow, and the water in the ditch beyond the gate was slow. There was a gravelly space for kids to play in, but there were no kids there. There were a slide and some swings and a teeter-totter, but they looked as deserted as bones, and over the whole place there hung a tight feeling, as if a twister were coming. Once, when a twister had come at home, all the windows in Mr. Dannenbaum's house had been blown out, and it had taken the dinner off some old folks' table, and when Jim and his grandmother went out to look, there was the gravy bowl sitting on top of a fence post without a drop gone out of it.

Jim meant to be meek and mild until the sun went down, so that they would not suspect, and when Mr. Standing-Deer got out to open the gate, he said quietly to Miss Hornet, "Are the children all asleep now?"

"Yes, we are all asleep now," she said. "Some of us aren't feeling any too well these hot days." Jim stole an anxious glance

V* *JF COWBOYS AND INDIANS, AND MAGIC MOUNTAINS

at her to see if she were sick with something catching, but he could tell nothing from her smooth brown face.

The buildings were big and were made of dark stone, and because the shades were down in most of the windows, they looked cool, and Jim thought comfortably of how he would spend this little time before nightfall and of all the cool things there would be inside—a drink of water and some potted ferns and cold white busts of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington and rubber treads on the stairs, like those in the public school back in Missouri. Mr. Standing-Deer stopped the car by one of the smaller buildings, whose walls were covered with trumpet creeper. There had been trumpet creeper at Grandma's, too, growing over the backhouse, and a silly little girl named Lady had thought the blossoms were really trumpets and said the fairies could hear her playing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" on them. She was the girl who had said she had found a worm in a chocolate bar and a tack in a cracker. With Lady, Jim used to float nasturtium leaves on the rain water in the tubs, and then they would eat them as they sat in the string hammock under the shade of the sycamores.

It was true that there were ferns in the hall of the small building, and Jim looked at them greedily, though they were pale and juiceless-looking and grew out of a sagging wicker-covered box. To the left of the door was an office, and in it, behind a desk, sat a big Indian woman who was lacing the fingers of one hand with a rubber band. She was wearing a man's white shirt and a necktie with an opal stickpin, and around her fat waist she wore a broad beaded belt. Her hair was braided around her head, and right at the top there was a trumpet flower, looking perfectly natural, as if it grew there.

"Is this the new boy?" she said to Miss Hornet.

"Who else would it be, pray tell?" said Miss Hornet crossly.

"My name is Miss Dreadfulwater," said the woman at the desk in an awful, roaring voice, and then she laughed and grabbed Jim's hand and shouted, "And you'd better watch your step or I'll dreadfulwater you."

Jim shivered and turned his eyes away from this crazy woman, and he heard his distant voice say, "Did you get Mr. Wilkins' telegram?"

A Summer Day (355

"Telegram?" boomed Miss Dreadfulwater, and laughed uproariously. "Oh, sure, we got his telegram. Telegram and longdistance telephone call. Didn't you come in a de-luxe Pullman drawing room? And didn't Uncle Sam his own self meet you in the company limousine? Why, yes, sir, Mr. Wilkins, and Uncle Sam and Honest Harold in Washington, and all of us here have just been thinking about hardly anything else but Jim Little-field."

Mr. Standing-Deer said wearily, "For Christ's sake, Sally, turn on the soft music. The kid's dead beat."

"I'm dead beat, too, Mr. Lying-Moose and Miss Yellow-Jacket, and I say it's too much. It's too much, I say. There are six more down in this dormitory alone, and that leaves, altogether, eight well ones. And the well ones are half dead on their feet at that, the poor little old buzzards."

There was something wrong with Miss Dreadfulwater that Jim could not quite understand. He would have said she was drunk if she hadn't been a woman and a sort of teacher. She took a card out of the desk and asked him how old he was and if he had been vaccinated and what his parents' names were. He wanted a drink of water, or wanted at least to go and smell the ferns, but he dared not ask and stood before the desk feeling that he was already sick with whatever it was the others were sick with. Mr. Standing-Deer took a gun out of his coat pocket and put it on the desk and then he went down the hall, saying over his shoulder, "I guess they're all too sick to try and fly the coop for a while."

"How old was your mother when she died?" said Miss Dreadfulwater.

"Eighteen and a half," said Jim.

"How do you know?" she said.

"Grandma told me. Besides, I knew."

"You knew? You remember your mother?"

"Yes," said Jim. "She was a Bolshevik."

Miss Dreadfulwater put down her Eversharp and looked straight into his eyes. "Are you crazy with the heat or am I?" she said.

He rather liked her, after all, and so he smiled until Miss Hornet said, "Hurry along, Sally, I haven't got all day."

*5p *5P COWBOYS AND INDIANS, AND MAGIC MOUNTAINS

"O.K., O.K., Queenie. I just wanted to straighten out this about the Bolshevik."

"Oh, do it later," said Miss Hornet. "You know he's just making up a story. They all do when they first come."

Miss Dreadfulwater asked some more questions—whether his tonsils were out, who Mr. Wilkins was, whether Jim thought he was a full-blood or a half-breed or what. She finished finally and put the card back in the drawer, and then Miss Hornet said to Jim, "What would you like to do now? You're free to do whatever you like till suppertime. It's perfectly clear that you have no unpacking to do."

"Did he come just like this?" said Miss Dreadfulwater, astonished. "Really?"

Miss Hornet ignored her and said, "What would you like to do?"

"I don't know," Jim said.

"Of course you do," she said sharply. "Do you want to play on the slide? Or the swings? None of the other children are out, but I should think a boy of eight could find plenty of ways to amuse himself."

"I can," he said. "I'll go outside."

"He ought to go to bed," said Miss Dreadfulwater. "You ought to put him to bed right now if you don't want him to come down with it."

"Be still, Sally," said Miss Hornet. "You run along now, Jim."

Although Jim was terribly thirsty, he did not stop to look for a drinking fountain or even to glance at the ferns. The composition floor was cool to his feet, but when he went out the door the heat came at him like a slapping hand. He did not mind it, because he would soon escape. The word "escape" itself refreshed him and he said it twice under his breath as he walked across the lawn.

In back of the building, there was a good-sized tree and a boy was sitting in the shade of it. He wore a green visor, and he was reading a book and chewing gum like sixty.

Jim walked up to him and said, "Do you know where any water is?"

The boy took off the visor, and Jim saw that his eyes were

A Summer Day (357

bright red. They were so startling that he could not help staring. The boy said, "The water's poisonous. There's an epidemic here."

Jim connected the poisonous water and the sickness in the dormitory with the boy's red eyes, and he was motionless with fear. The boy put his gum on his lower lip and clamped it there with his upper teeth, which were striped with gray and were finely notched, like a bread knife. "One died," he said, and laughed and rolled over on his stomach.

At the edge of the lawn beyond all the buildings, Jim saw a line of trees, the sort that follow a riverbank, and he thought that when it got dark, that was where he would go. But he was afraid, and even though it was hot and still here and he was thirsty, he did not want the day to end soon, and he said to the ugly, laughing boy, "Isn't there any good water at all?"

"There is," said the boy, sitting up again and putting his visor on, "but not for Indians. I'm going to run away." He popped his gum twice and then he pulled it out of his mouth for a full foot and swung it gently, like a skipping rope.

Jim said, "When?"

"When my plans are laid," said the boy, showing all his strange teeth in a smile that was not the least friendly. "You know whose hangout is over there past the trees?"

"No, whose?"

"Clyde Barrow's," whispered the boy. "Not long ago, they came and smoked him out with tommy guns. That's where I'm going when I leave here."

For the first time, Jim noticed the boy's clothes. He wore blue denim trousers and a blue shirt to match, and instead of a belt, he wore a bright-red sash, about the color of his eyes. It was certainly not anything Jim had ever seen any other boy wear, and he said, pointing to it, "Is that a flag or something?"

"It's the red sash," replied the boy. "It's a penalty. You aren't supposed to be talking to me when I have it on." He gave Jim a nasty, secret smile and took his gum out of his mouth and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. "What's your name, anyway?" he asked.

"Jim Littlefield."

"That's not Indian. My name is Rock Forward Mankiller.

?F *W COWBOYS AND INDIANS, AND MAGIC MOUNTAINS

My father's name is Son-of-the-Man-Who-Looked-Like-a-Bunch-of-Rags-Thrown-Down. It's not that long in Navajo."

"Navajo?" asked Jim.

"Hell, yes. I'm not no Cherokee," said the boy.

"What did you do to make them put the red sash on you?" Jim asked, wishing to know, yet not wanting to hear.

"Wouldn't you like to know?" said Rock Forward and started to chew his gum again. Jim sat down in the shade beside him and looked at his burned foot. There was no blister, but it was red and the skin felt drawn. His head ached and his throat was sore, and he wanted to lie down on his stomach and go to sleep, but he dared not, lest he be sleeping when the night came. He felt again the burden of the waiting silence; once a fool blue jay started to raise the roof in Clyde Barrow's woods and a couple of times he heard a cow moo, but the rest of the time there was only this hot stillness in which the red-eyed boy stared at him calmly.

"What do they do if you escape and they catch you?" Jim asked, trembling and giving himself away.

"Standing-Deer comes after you with his six-gun, and then you get the red sash," said Rock Forward, eyeing him closely. "You can't get far unless you lay your plans. I know what you're thinking about, Littlefield. All new kids do. I'm wise to it." He giggled and stretched his arms out wide, and once again he showed his sickening teeth.

The desire to sleep was so strong that Jim was not even angry with Rock Forward, and he swayed to and fro, half dozing, longing to lie full length on a bed and dimly to hear the sounds the awake people made through a half-open door. Little, bright-colored memories came to him pleasantly, like the smallest valentines. The reason he knew that his mother had been a Bolshevik was that she'd had a pair of crimson satin slippers, which Grandma had kept in a drawer, along with her best crocheted pot holders and an album of picture postal cards from Gettysburg. The lovely shoes were made of satin and the heels were covered with rhinestones. The shiny cloth, roughened in places, was the color of Rock Forward's eyes and of his sash. Jim said, "No kidding, why do you have to wear the red sash?"

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"I stole Standing-Deer's gun, if you want to know, and I said, 'To hell with Uncle Sam/ "

Jim heard what the boy said but he paid no mind, and he said, not to the boy or to anyone, "I'll wait till tomorrow. I'm too sleepy now."

Nor did Rock Forward pay any heed to Jim. Instead, he said, turning his head away and talking in the direction of the outlaw's hangout, "If I get sick with the epidemic and die, I'll kill them all. Standing-Deer first and Dreadfulwater second and Hornet third. I'll burn the whole place up and I'll spit everywhere."

"Do you have a father?" said Jim, scarcely able to get the words out.

"Of course I have a father," said Rock Forward in a sudden rage. "Didn't I just tell you his name? Didn't you know he was in jail for killing a well-known attorney in Del Rio, Texas? If he knew I was here, he'd kill them all. He'd take this red sash and tear it to smithereens. I'm no orphan and I'm not a Cherokee like the rest of you either, and when I get out of here, Standing-Deer had just better watch out. He'd just better watch his p's and q's when I get a six-gun of my own." Passionately, he tore off his visor and bent it double, cracking it smack down the middle of the isinglass, and then, without another word, he went running off in the direction of the line of trees, the ends of the red sash flapping at his side.

Jim was too sleepy to care about anything now—now that he had decided to wait until tomorrow. He did not even care that it was hot. He lay down on the sickly grass, and for a while he watched a lonesome leaf-cutter bee easing a little piece of plantain into its hole. He hoped they would not wake him up and make him walk into the dormitory; he hoped that Mr. Standing-Deer would come and carry him, and he could see himself with his head resting on that massive shoulder in the spotted coat. He saw himself growing smaller and smaller and lying in a bureau drawer, like Kayo in the funny papers. He rustled in his sleep, moving away from the sharp heels of the red shoes, and something as soft and deep and safe as fur held him in a still joy.

*

9 9

The Philosophy Lesson

Cora Savage watched the first real snowfall of the year through the long, trefoiled windows of the studio where the Life Class met. It was a high, somber room in one of the two square towers of the auditorium, which, because of some personal proclivity of the donor, were exorbitantly Gothic and had nothing to do with the other buildings on the campus, which were serene and low and Italian Renaissance. Here, in this chilly room, three mornings a week from nine until twelve, twenty-seven students met in smocks to render Cora, naked, on canvases in oil, and on sheets of coarse-grained paper in charcoal, seriously applying those principles of drawing they had learned, in slide talks, in their lecture classes. But just as Cora had predicted to her anxious United Presbyterian mother, the students took no more account of Cora than if she had been a plaster cast or an assemblage of apples and lemons for a still-life study. At first, the class had been disquieted by her inhuman ability to remain motionless so long, and they chattered about it among themselves as if she had no ears to hear. Their instructor, Mr. Steele, a fat and comfort-loving man who spent a good part of the three hours seated on a padded bench, reading and, from time to time, brewing coffee for himself on a hot plate behind a screen, told them bluffly that since this talent of hers could not possibly last, they should take advantage of it while it did. Thereafter, they ceased to speak of her except in the argot of their craft. Mr. Steele, deep in Trol-lope, was polite if they sought him out for help, and, once an hour, he made a tour of the room, going from easel to easel commenting kindly but perfunctorily.

Cora rested only twice in the three hours. After she struck the pose at nine, she waited, in heavy pain, for the deep bell to

?P *F COWBOYS AND INDIANS, AND MAGIC MOUNTAINS

ring in the chapel tower, signaling the passage of fifty minutes. When she stepped off the dais with the first peal and came to recognizable life again by putting on her blue flannel wrapper, a tide of comfort immediately and completely washed away the cramps and tingles in her arms and legs. For ten minutes, then, she sat on the edge of her platform, smoking cigarettes, which, because of her fatigue, made her agreeably dizzy and affected her eyes so that the light altered, shifting, like the light on the prairies, from sage-green to a submarine violet, to saffron, to the color of a Seckel pear. When the bell rang again, on the hour, she turned herself to stone. She did not talk to the students, unless they spoke first to her, nor did she look at their drawings and paintings until afterward, when everyone was gone and she stepped out from behind her screen, fully dressed. Then she wandered about through the thicket of easels and saw the travesties of herself, grown fat, grown shriveled, grown horsefaced, turned into Clara Bow. The representations of her face were, nearly invariably, the faces of the authors of the work. Her complete anonymity to them at once enraged and fascinated her.

As she posed, she stared through those high, romantic windows at the sky and the top of a cottonwood tree. Usually, because the tension of her muscles would not allow her to think or to pursue a fantasy to its happy ending, she counted slowly by ones, to a hundred, and she had become so precise in her timing that five minutes passed in each counting: ten hundreds, a thousand, and then the bell commenced to ring. Often she felt she must now surely faint or cry out against the pain that began midway through the first hour, began as an itching and a stinging in the part of her body that bore the most weight and then gradually overran her like a disease until the whole configuration of bone and muscle dilated and all her pulses throbbed. Nerves jerked in her neck and a random shudder seized her shoulder blades and sometimes, although it was cold in the studio, all her skin was hot and her blood roared; her heart deafened her. If she had closed her eyes, she would have fallen down—nothing held her to her position except the scene through the windows, an abridgment of the branches of the cottonwood tree whose every twig and half-dead leaf she knew by heart so that she still saw it, if her mind's eye wandered. She knew the differences of the sheen

The Philosophy Lesson (363

on its bark in rain and in sun and how the dancing of the branches varied with the winds; she waited for birds and squirrels, and if they came, she lost track of her numbers and the time went quickly. She had grown fond of the tree through knowledge of it and at noon, when she left the building—this beautiful release was like the first day after an illness and all the world was fresh—she greeted it as if it were her possession, and she thought how pleasant it would look when its leaves came back to it in April.

Thus, while she recognized the chills and fevers and the pins and needles that bedeviled her, she remained detached from them as if their connection with her was adventitious and the real business at hand was the thorough study of her prospect of bits of wood and bits of cloud, and counting to tell the hours.

On the day of the first snowfall, though, she did not deny her discomfort, she simply and truly did not feel it and, although she was pinioned, she drifted in a charming ease, a floating, as if she hovered, slowly winding, like the flakes themselves. The snow began in the second hour, just as she resumed her pose, one in which she held a pole upright like a soldier with a spear. It was the most unmerciful attitude she had yet held, for all her weight lay on her right heel, which seemed to seek a grafting with the dais, and the arm that held the pole swelled until she imagined in time it would be so bellied out that her vaccination scar would appear as an umbilical indentation. For the first time she had felt put upon, and during her first rest she had been angry with the students and with Mr. Steele, who took it for granted that she was made of a substance different from theirs. And, when a girl in Oxford glasses and a spotless green linen smock, radiating good will, came to sit for a moment on the dais and said admiringly, "That would kill me! Are you going to do this professionally?" she was the more affronted; the servant whose ambitions go beyond his present status does not wish to be complimented on the way he polishes the silver.

When the snow came, the studio was dematerialized. The storm began so suddenly, with so little warning from the skies, that for a moment Cora doubted its existence, whirling there in the cottonwood, and thought that her eyes had invented it out of a need to vary their view. She loved the snow. When she

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had first heard of heaven, she had thought it would be a place where snow was forever falling and forever concealing the harshness of the world. And she had never remembered, when she was a child, from one year to the next how cold snow was; always, when the first flakes flew, she had run out in her bare feet, expecting the miraculous purity to be as soft as a cat, and then she ran back into the house to lie on the floor in the front hall, giggling with surprise.

In Missouri, by the river, the snow was as hard as a floor, but now and then a soft place would take her unawares and she would go in up to the top of her galoshes, and then she was a mess, her astrakhan coat covered with snow, her tasseled yellow mittens soaking wet. They went, she and her father and her brother Randall, for the Christmas greens each year, for holly and ground hemlock and partridge berry to put in the long, cold summer parlor where a green carpet spread like a lawn. The purple light of early Christmas morning came through the scrim curtains as the Savage children, Cora and Randall, Abigail and Evangeline, opened their presents. Often snow fell on Christmas day, shutting them in, protecting them, putting a spell on them. The little girls, wearing new tam-o'-shanters, wearing the bracelets and rings and fake wrist watches sent by cousins, surrounded by double-jointed dolls and sets of colored pencils, pig banks, patent-leather pocketbooks, jackstones, changeable taffeta hair ribbons, teased their poor brother with his ungainly boy's things-tool chests, fishing gear, the year he was eight, a .22.

The snow had been best, perhaps, most elegant there in Missouri. There had been times when Grandmother Savage had driven over from Kavanagh to call; she had an old-fashioned sleigh with rakish curled runners. In the little parlor, what Mr. Savage derisively called "the pastor's parlor," they drank hot cocoa from fat, hand-painted cups, bordered with a frieze of asters. And all the while the snow was coming down.

More elegant in Missouri, but it had been more keenly exciting here in Adams. Randall and Cora (by now Cora was a tomboy and disdained her older sisters) often took their sleds over the practice ski jumps in the foothills behind the college. The wind was knocked out of them as they hit the ground and once Cora lost control and went hurtling into a barbed-wire fence. It

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seemed to her, on reflection, that she had slowly revolved on her head, like a top, for a long time before the impact. Then, too frightened to move lest she find she could not, she had lain there waiting for her brother. Blood, in niggardly drops, from the wounds in her forehead stained the snow. Afterward, she had been afraid of the ski jumps and had only coasted down a steep hill that terminated in a cemetery; but this was dangerous enough, and reckless children sometimes crashed into the spiked palings of the iron fence and broke their heads wide open. There were so many of these accidents and the injuries were often so nearly serious that a city ordinance was passed, forbidding anyone to slide down that street. Then, added to the danger, there was the additional thrill of possibly being caught by the police and put into jail. One hid oneself and one's sled behind the spooky little stone house at the graveyard's edge, where the caretaker kept his lawn mover and gardening tools, and waited for the Black Maria. But it never came.

Cora was pleased today that probably she alone in the studio had seen what was happening outside. The students were intent on their work, applying to each other for criticism or for pallette knives, measuring parts of Cora with pencils held at arm's length as they squinted and grimaced; sometimes, to her mistrust, they came quite close to examine the shape of a muscle or the color of a shadow on her skin. For the time being, the snow was a private experience; perhaps everything at this moment proceeded from her own mind, even this grubby room with its forest of apparatus and its smell of banana oil, even all these people. She thought of Bishop Berkeley, whom Dr. Bosch had assigned to the class in Introduction to Philosophy; she thought of the way Berkeley had dismantled the world of its own reality and had made each idiom of it into an idea in the mind of God. "Or in his own mind," said Dr. Bosch dryly, for he had no use for the Bishop. This morning, Cora had much use for him, and she concluded that she would be at peace forever if she could believe that she existed only for herself and possibly for a superior intelligence and that no one existed for her save when he was tangibly present.

As she pondered this quieting phenomenon (it just might work, she just might tutor herself to believe in such sublimity),

the door to the studio opened and she turned away from the window. A latecomer entered, a boy in a sheep-lined mackinaw and a freshman beanie; his ashen corduroy trousers, freckled with oil paint, were tucked into the tops of his yellow field boots. His name was Ernie Wharton and he had been in high school with Cora; in the beginning, she had resented him and had disliked hearing that familiar voice she had heard the year before in Spanish II. Once she had even been in a play with him and on several evenings after rehearsal he had walked her home and they had talked at length at the foot of the steps on Benedict Street, where the smell of lilacs nearly led her to infatuation. But they had only gone on talking learnedly of The Ode on Intimations of Immortality, which both of them admired. On the first day of the Life Class, he, too, had been embarrassed, and had looked only at the model's feet and at her face, but in time he merged into the general background and was no more specific to her than any of the others.

Panting, as if he had been running, red from the cold, his canine face (the face of an amiable dog, a border collie) wore a look of befuddlement and at first Cora thought it stemmed from worry over his being so late, but she knew this could not be true, for Mr. Steele paid no heed at all to the arrival and departure of his students. Indeed, he did not so much as look up from Framley Parsonage when the outside air came rushing through the door, up the spiral staircase. No one gave Ernie's entrance more than passing recognition, no one but Cora, at whom he looked directly and whom he seemed to address, as if he had come to bring this news exclusively to her. "Somebody just committed suicide on the Base Line," he said.

In their incredulity, the class fell over itself, dropped pencils, splashed turpentine, tore paper, catapulted against their easels, said, "Oh, damn it." Then they surrounded Ernie, who stood against the door as if he did not mean to stay but was only a courier stopping at one of the many stations on his route. Although no one was looking at her, Cora continued to hold her pose and to look at the snow in her tree, but she listened and, now and then, stole a glance at the narrator's face, awry with dismay and with a sort of excruciated pleasure in the violent

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finality of the act he described. A second-year pre-medical student, two hours before, had been run over by the morning mail train coming from Denver. He had driven his car to the outskirts of town and there it had been found at a crossing, its motor still running. The engineer had seen the body on the tracks but he had had no time to stop the train, and the man had been broken to pieces. Wharton had gone out there (they were fraternity brothers; the president had called him just as he was leaving for class) and had seen the butchered mess, the head cut loose, the legs shivered, one hand, perched like a bird, on a scrub oak. His name was Bernard Allen, said Ernie, and he had been one prince of a fellow.

Bernard Allen!

The girl in Oxford glasses went pale and said, "My godfather, I knew him! I went to the Phi Gam tea dance with him Friday."

(Friday? thought Cora. But that was the night he and Maisie Perrine went horseback riding. That was the night I saw his white hair shining like this snow as I looked out my bedroom window toward the boarding house where Maisie lives next door to us. I, spying at all hours of the day and night, spying and tortured at what I saw, saw Bernard Allen's blue Cord town car draw up to Mrs. Mullen's house at midnight last Friday. Bernard and Maisie must have been to a dance, for Maisie was wearing a long dress of gold lame and her sable coat. "I'll be waiting on the porch. Don't be long," said Maisie. They kissed connubially. "I hate to have you take off that gorgeous dress," said Bernard, and she replied, "I'd look good riding a horse in this, wouldn't I?" He let her out of the car and took her to the door and then he drove away. Half an hour later he was back and Maisie, in riding clothes, ran down the sagging steps of Mrs. Mullen's front porch. Where would they find a stable open at this time of night? They could. They would. For they had claimed the pot of gold and were spending it all on everything their hearts desired, on clothes and cars and bootleg whiskey. Probably one of them kept a string of blooded horses somewhere with a stableman so highly paid that he did not mind being waked up in the middle of the night. "Why didn't you bring Luster?" asked

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Maisie. "Because he doesn't like the moon." Luster was his dog, a golden retriever. They drove away then in the direction of Left Hand Canyon. I suppose eventually I went to sleep.)

Forgetting now that Ernie Wharton's facts were immediate and that, because he had been united with the dead boy in a secret order, his was the right to tell the tale and to lead the speculation—forgetting this, the art students shrilly turned to the girl in Oxford glasses. Had he been strange, they asked her, had he seemed cracked?

"He was like everybody else," she said, "like all pre-meds. You know, a little high-hat the way they all are because they know those six-dollar words."

She did not like to speak ill of the dead, she said, but, frankly, Bernard had been the world's worst dancer and, as she looked back on it, she thought he had probably been tight. Not that that made any difference, she quickly added, because she was broad-minded, but it might throw some light on his suicide. Maybe he was drunk this morning. It was unlikely, she supposed, that he would have been drinking at eight-thirty in the morning. Still, you never could tell. She could not think of anything else about him. Except that he had this pure white hair—not blond, not towheaded; he had had a grandfather's white hair. It had been a blind date and a very short one, for they'd only gone to the dance and that was over at six and then she had gone right home to dress for the SAE formal. It had been just one of those dates that fills an afternoon and comes to nothing, when you get along all right, but you aren't much interested. Christmas, though, it gave her the creeps.

All the time the girl talked, Ernie stared at her, dumbstruck with rage. How dare she be so flip, said his frosty eyes. Presently, because her facts were thin, the students returned to him and they interrogated him closely as if he were a witness in a court of law. What had they done with the car? How long was it before the police arrived? Where did the guy come from? Had his family been told? At first, Ernie answered factually but abstractedly and then, hectored by a repetition of the same questions, he grew impatient and, turning wrathfully on the girl in the green smock, he shouted, "I'm not sure you knew him at all. He was engaged. He was engaged to be married to Maisie Per-

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rine, and they announced it at the Chi Psi dance about three hours after you claim to have been at a tea dance with him."

The girl laughed lightly. "Keep your shirt on, sonny. That doesn't cut any ice. Can't you be engaged to somebody and take somebody else to a tea dance?"

Ernie said, "Not if you're so deep you end up by killing yourself."

"Oh, bushwa," said the girl and went back to her easel, but she was the only one who did, and among the others a moral debate began: whether suicide did demonstrate depth, whether suicide was an act of cowardice or of bravery.

Cora no longer listened. She was thinking of Maisie Perrine and wondering whether her yellow Cadillac roadster was there now at the crossing, its top whitened with snow, the windshield wipers going. Maybe she did not know yet and was still in class, still undisheveled in her orderly, expensive clothes, her sumptuous red hair shining, her fine hand taking down notes on Middle English marketplace romances. What would happen when she heard? And where was Luster, where was Bernard Allen's fond golden dog?

And what was the misery that had brought the boy to suicide? Rich, privileged, in love, he and his girl had seemed the very paradigm of joy. Why had he done it? And yet, why not? Why did not she, who was seldom happy, do it herself? A darkness beat her like the wings of an enormous bird and frantic terror of the ultimate hopelessness shook her until the staff she held slipped and her heart seemed for a moment to fail. She began to sweat and could feel the drops creeping down her legs. The bell rang and her pole went clattering to the floor, knocking over a portrait on an easel nearby, and all the students, still talking of the death that morning, looked up with exclamations of shock, but she could tell by their faces that none of them had been thinking her thoughts, that she alone, silent and stationary there on the dais, had shared Bernard Allen's experience and had plunged with him into sightlessness. No. No, wait a minute. Each mortal in the room must, momentarily, have died. But just as the fledgling artists put their own faces on their canvases, so they had perished in their own particular ways.

The snow was a benison. It forgave them all.

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Children Are Bored on Sunday

Through the wide doorway between two of the painting galleries, Emma saw Alfred Eisenburg standing before "The Three Miracles of Zenobius," his lean, equine face ashen and sorrowing, his gaunt frame looking undernourished, and dressed in a way that showed he was poorer this year than he had been last. Emma herself had been hunting for the Botticelli all afternoon, sidetracked first by a Mantegna she had forgotten, and then by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch, and distracted, in an English room as she was passing through, by the hot invective of two ladies who were lodged (so they bitterly reminded one another) in an outrageous and expensive mare's-nest at a hotel on Madison. Emma liked Alfred, and once, at a party in some other year, she had flirted with him slightly for seven or eight minutes. It had been spring, and even into that modern apartment, wherever it had been, while the cunning guests, on their guard and highly civilized, learnedly disputed on aesthetic and political subjects, the feeling of spring had boldly invaded, adding its nameless, sentimental sensations to all the others of the buffeted heart; one did not know and never had, even in the devouring raptures of adolescence, whether this was a feeling of tension or of solution— whether one flew or drowned.

In another year, she would have been pleased to run into Alfred here in the Metropolitan on a cold Sunday, when the galleries were thronged with out-of-towners and with people who dutifully did something self-educating on the day of rest. But this year she was hiding from just such people as Alfred Eisenburg, and she turned quickly to go back the way she had come, past the Constables and Raeburns. As she turned, she came face to face with Salvador Dali, whose sudden countenance, with its

unlikely mustache and its histrionic eyes, familiar from the photographs in public places, momentarily stopped her dead, for she did not immediately recognize him and, still surprised by seeing Eisenburg, took him also to be someone she knew. She shuddered and then realized that he was merely famous, and she penetrated the heart of a guided tour and proceeded safely through the rooms until she came to the balcony that overlooks the medieval armor, and there she paused, watching two youths of high-school age examine the joints of an equestrian's shell.

She paused because she could not decide what to look at now that she had been denied the Botticelli. She wondered, rather crossly, why Alfred Eisenburg was looking at it and why, indeed, he was here at all. She feared that her afternoon, begun in such a burst of courage, would not be what it might have been; for this second's glimpse of him—who had no bearing on her life—might very well divert her from the pictures, not only because she was reminded of her ignorance of painting by the presence of someone who was (she assumed) versed in it but because her eyesight was now bound to be impaired by memory and conjecture, by the irrelevant mind-portraits of innumerable people who belonged to Eisenburg's milieu. And almost at once, as she had predicted, the air separating her from the schoolboys below was populated with the images of composers, of painters, of writers who pronounced judgments, in their individual argot, on Hindemith, Ernst, Sartre, on Beethoven, Rubens, Baudelaire, on Stalin and Freud and Kierkegaard, on Toynbee, Frazer, Thoreau, Franco, Salazar, Roosevelt, Maimonides, Racine, Wallace, Picasso, Henry Luce, Monsignor Sheen, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the movie industry. And she saw herself moving, shaky with apprehensions and martinis, and with the belligerence of a child who feels himself laughed at, through the apartments of Alfred Eisenburg's friends, where the shelves were filled with everyone from Aristophanes to Ring Lardner, where the walls were hung with reproductions of Seurat, Titian, Ver-meer, and Klee, and where the record cabinets began with Palestrina and ended with Copland.

These cocktail parties were a modus vivendi in themselves for which a new philosophy, a new ethic, and a new etiquette had had to be devised. They were neither work nor play, and yet

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they were not at all beside the point but were, on the contrary, quite indispensable to the spiritual life of the artists who went to them. It was possible for Emma to see these occasions objectively, after these many months of abstention from them, but it was still not possible to understand them, for they were so special a case, and so unlike any parties she had known at home. The gossip was different, for one thing, because it was stylized, creative (integrating the whole of the garrotted, absent friend), and all its details were precise and all its conceits were Jamesian, and all its practitioners sorrowfully saw themselves in the role of Pontius Pilate, that hero of the untoward circumstance. (It has to be done, though we don't want to do it; 'tis a pity she's a whore, when no one writes more intelligent verse than she.) There was, too, the matter of the drinks, which were much worse than those served by anyone else, and much more plentiful. They dispensed with the fripperies of olives in martinis and cherries in manhattans (God forbid! They had no sweet teeth), and half the time there was no ice, and when there was, it was as likely as not to be suspect shavings got from a bed for shad at the corner fish store. Other species, so one heard, went off to dinner after cocktail parties certainly no later than half past eight, but no one ever left a party given by an Olympian until ten, at the earliest, and then groups went out together, stalling and squabbling at the door, angrily unable to come to a decision about where to eat, although they seldom ate once they got there but, with the greatest formality imaginable, ordered several rounds of cocktails, as if they had not had a drink in a month of Sundays. But the most surprising thing of all about these parties was that every now and again, in the middle of the urgent, general conversation, this cream of the enlightened was horribly curdled, and an argument would end, quite literally, in a bloody nose or a black eye. Emma was always astounded when this happened and continued to think that these outbursts did not arise out of hatred or jealousy but out of some quite unaccountable quirk, almost a reflex, almost something physical. She never quite believed her eyes—that is, was never altogether convinced that they were really beating one another up. It seemed, rather, that this was only a deliberate and perfectly honest demonstration of what might have happened often if they had not so diligently

dedicated themselves to their intellects. Although she had seen them do it, she did not and could not believe that city people clipped each other's jaws, for, to Emma, urban equaled urbane, and ichor ran in these Augustans' veins.

As she looked down now from her balcony at the atrocious iron clothes below, it occurred to her that Alfred Eisenburg had been just such a first-generation metropolitan boy as these two who half knelt in lithe and eager attitudes to study the glittering splints of a knight's skirt. It was a kind of childhood she could not imagine and from the thought of which she turned away in secret, shameful pity. She had been really stunned when she first came to New York to find that almost no one she met had gluttonously read Dickens, as she had, beginning at the age of ten, and because she was only twenty when she arrived in the city and unacquainted with the varieties of cultural experience, she had acquired the idea, which she was never able to shake entirely loose, that these New York natives had been deprived of this and many other innocent pleasures because they had lived in apartments and not in two- or three-story houses. (In the early years in New York, she had known someone who had not heard a cat purr until he was twenty-five and went to a houseparty on Fire Island.) They had played hide-and-seek dodging behind ash cans instead of lilac bushes and in and out of the entries of apartment houses instead of up alleys densely lined with hollyhocks. But who was she to patronize and pity them? Her own childhood, rich as it seemed to her on reflection, had not equipped her to read, or to see, or to listen, as theirs had done; she envied them and despised them at the same time, and at the same time she feared and admired them. As their attitude implicitly accused her, before she beat her retreat, she never looked for meanings, she never saw the literary-historical symbolism of the cocktail party but went on, despite all testimony to the contrary, believing it to be an occasion for getting drunk. She never listened, their manner delicately explained, and when she talked she was always lamentably off key; often and often she had been stared at and had been told, "It's not the same thing at all."

Emma shuddered, scrutinizing this nature of hers, which they all had scorned, as if it were some harmless but sickening

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reptile. Noticing how cold the marble railing was under her hands, she felt that her self-blame was surely justified; she came to the Metropolitan Museum not to attend to the masterpieces but to remember cocktail parties where she had drunk too much and had seen Alfred Eisenburg, and to watch schoolboys, and to make experience out of the accidental contact of the palms of her hands with a cold bit of marble. What was there to do? One thing, anyhow, was clear and that was that today's excursion into the world had been premature; her solitude must continue for a while, and perhaps it would never end. If the sight of someone so peripheral, so uninvolving, as Alfred Eisenburg could scare her so badly, what would a cocktail party do? She almost fainted at the thought of it, she almost fell headlong, and the boys, abandoning the coat of mail, dizzied her by their progress toward an emblazoned tabard.

In so many words, she wasn't fit to be seen. Although she was no longer mutilated, she was still unkempt; her pretensions needed brushing; her ambiguities needed to be cleaned; her evasions would have to be completely overhauled before she could face again the terrifying learning of someone like Alfred Eisenburg, a learning whose components cohered into a central personality that was called "intellectual." She imagined that even the boys down there had opinions on everything political and artistic and metaphysical and scientific, and because she remained, in spite of all her opportunities, as green as grass, she was certain they had got their head start because they had grown up in apartments, where there was nothing else to do but educate themselves. This being an intellectual was not the same thing as dilettantism; it was a calling in itself. For example, Emma did not even know whether Eisenburg was a painter, a writer, a composer, a sculptor, or something entirely different. When, seeing him with the composers, she had thought he was one of them; when, the next time she met him, at a studio party, she decided he must be a painter; and when, on subsequent occasions, everything had pointed toward his being a writer, she had relied altogether on circumstantial evidence and not on anything he had said or done. There was no reason to suppose that he had not looked upon her as the same sort of variable and it made their anonymity to one another complete. Without the testimony

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of an impartial third person, neither she nor Eisenburg would ever know the other's actual trade. But his specialty did not matter, for his larger designation was that of "the intellectual," just as the man who confines his talents to the nose and throat is still a doctor. It was, in the light of this, all the more extraordinary that they had had that lightning-paced flirtation at a party.

Extraordinary, because Emma could not look upon herself as an intellectual. Her private antonym of this noun was "rube," and to her regret—the regret that had caused her finally to disappear from Alfred's group—she was not even a bona-fide rube. In her store clothes, so to speak, she was often taken for an intellectual, for she had, poor girl, gone to college and had never been quite the same since. She would not dare, for instance, go up to Eisenburg now and say that what she most liked in the Botticelli were the human and compassionate eyes of the centurions' horses, which reminded her of the eyes of her own Great-uncle Graham, whom she had adored as a child. Nor would she admit that she was delighted with a Crivelli Madonna because the peaches in the background looked exactly like marzipan, or that Goya's little red boy inspired in her only the pressing desire to go out immediately in search of a plump cat to stroke. While she knew that feelings like these were not really punishable, she had not perfected the art of tossing them off; she was no flirt. She was a bounty jumper in the war between Great-uncle Graham's farm and New York City, and liable to court-martial on one side and death on the other. Neither staunchly primitive nor confidently au courant, she rarely knew where she was at. And this was her Achilles' heel: her identity was always mistaken, and she was thought to be an intellectual who, however, had not made the grade. It was no use now to cry that she was not, that she was a simon-pure rube; not a soul would believe her. She knew, deeply and with horror, that she was thought merely stupid.

It was possible to be highly successful as a rube among the Olympians, and she had seen it done. Someone calling himself Nahum Mothersill had done it brilliantly, but she often wondered whether his name had not helped him, and, in fact, she had sometimes wondered whether that had been his real name.

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If she had been called, let us say, Hyacinth Derryberry, she believed she might have been able, as Mothersill had been, to ask who Ezra Pound was. (This struck her suddenly as a very important point; it was endearing, really, not to know who Pound was, but it was only embarrassing to know who he was but not to have read the "Cantos.") How different it would have been if education had not meddled with her rustic nature! Her education had never dissuaded her from her convictions, but certainly it had ruined the looks of her mind—painted the poor thing up until it looked like a mean, hypocritical, promiscuous malcontent, a craven and apologetic fancy woman. Thus she continued secretly to believe (but never to confess) that the apple Eve had eaten tasted exactly like those she had eaten when she was a child visiting on her Great-uncle Graham's farm, and that Newton's observation was no news in spite of all the hue and cry. Half the apples she had eaten had fallen out of the tree, whose branches she had shaken for this very purpose, and the Apple Experience included both the descent of the fruit and the consumption of it, and Eve and Newton and Emma understood one another perfectly in this particular of reality.

Emma started. The Metropolitan boys, who, however bright they were, would be boys, now caused some steely article of dress to clank, and she instantly quit the balcony, as if this unseemly noise would attract the crowd's attention and bring everyone, including Eisenburg, to see what had happened. She scuttered like a quarry through the sightseers until she found an empty seat in front of Rembrandt's famous frump, "The Noble Slav"— it was this kind of thing, this fundamental apathy to most of Rembrandt, that made life in New York such hell for Emma— and there, upon the plum velours, she realized with surprise that Alfred Eisenburg's had been the last familiar face she had seen before she had closed the door of her tomb.

In September, it had been her custom to spend several hours of each day walking in a straight line, stopping only for traffic lights and outlaw taxicabs, in the hope that she would be tired enough to sleep at night. At five o'clock—and gradually it became more often four o'clock and then half past three—she would go into a bar, where, while she drank, she seemed to be reading the

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information offered by the Sun on "Where to Dine." Actually she had ceased to dine long since; every few days, with effort, she inserted thin wafers of food into her repelled mouth, flushing the frightful stuff down with enormous drafts of magical, purifying, fulfilling applejack diluted with tepid water from the tap. One weighty day, under a sky that grimly withheld the rain, as if to punish the whole city, she had started out from Ninetieth Street and had kept going down Madison and was thinking, as she passed the chancery of St. Patrick's, that it must be nearly time and that she needed only to turn east on Fiftieth Street to the New Weston, where the bar was cool, and dark to an almost absurd degree. And then she was hailed. She turned quickly, looking in all directions until she saw Eisenburg approaching, removing a gray pellet of gum from his mouth as he came. They were both remarkably shy and, at the time, she had thought they were so because this was the first time they had met since their brief and blameless flirtation. (How curious it was that she could scrape off the accretions of the months that had followed and could remember how she had felt on that spring night—as trembling, as expectant, as altogether young as if they had sat together underneath a blooming apple tree.) But now, knowing that her own embarrassment had come from something else, she thought that perhaps his had, too, and she connected his awkwardness on that September day with a report she had had, embedded in a bulletin on everyone, from her sole communicant, since her retreat, with the Olympian world. This informant had run into Alfred at a party and had said that he was having a very bad time of it with a divorce, with poverty, with a tempest that had carried off his job, and, at last, with a psychoanalyst, whose fees he could not possibly afford. Perhaps the nightmare had been well under way when they had met beside the chancery. Without alcohol and without the company of other people, they had had to be shy or their suffering would have shown in all its humiliating dishabille. Would it be true still if they should inescapably meet this afternoon in an Early Flemish room?

Suddenly, on this common level, in this state of social displacement, Emma wished to hunt for Alfred and urgently tell him that she hoped it had not been as bad for him as it had been for her. But naturally she was not so naive, and she got up and

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went purposefully to look at two Holbeins. They pleased her, as Holbeins always did. The damage, though, was done, and she did not really see the pictures; Eisenburg's hypothetical suffering and her own real suffering blurred the clean lines and muddied the lucid colors. Between herself and the canvases swam the months of spreading, cancerous distrust, of anger that made her seasick, of grief that shook her like an influenza chill, of the physical afflictions by which the poor victimized spirit sought vainly to wreck the arrogantly healthy flesh.

Even that one glance at his face, seen from a distance through the lowing crowd, told her, now that she had repeated it to her mind's eye, that his cheeks were drawn and his skin was gray (no soap and water can ever clean away the grimy look of the sick at heart) and his stance was tired. She wanted them to go together to some hopelessly disreputable bar and to console one another in the most maudlin fashion over a lengthy succession of powerful drinks of whisky, to compare their illnesses, to marry their invalid souls for these few hours of painful communion, and to babble with rapture that they were at last, for a little while, no longer alone. Only thus, as sick people, could they marry. In any other terms, it would be a mesalliance, doomed to divorce from the start, for rubes and intellectuals must stick to their own class. If only it could take place—this honeymoon of the cripples, this nuptial consummation of the abandoned—while drinking the delicious amber whisky in a joint with a jukebox, a stout barkeep, and a handful of tottering derelicts; if it could take place, would it be possible to prevent him from marring it all by talking of secondary matters? That is, of art and neurosis, art and politics, art and science, art and religion? Could he lay off the fashions of the day and leave his learning in his private entrepot? Could he, that is, see the apple fall and not run madly to break the news to Newton and ask him what on earth it was all about? Could he, for her sake (for the sake of this pathetic rube all but weeping for her own pathos in the Metropolitan Museum), forget the whole dispute and, believing his eyes for a change, admit that the earth was flat?

It was useless for her now to try to see the paintings. She went, full of intentions, to the Van Eyck diptych and looked for a long time at the souls in Hell, kept there by the implacable,

indifferent, and genderless angel who stood upon its closing mouth. She looked, in renewed astonishment, at Jo Davidson's pink, wrinkled, embalmed head of Jules Bache, which sat, a trinket on a fluted pedestal, before a Flemish tapestry. But she was really conscious of nothing but her desire to leave the museum in the company of Alfred Eisenburg, her cousin-german in the territory of despair.

So she had to give up, two hours before the closing time, although she had meant to stay until the end, and she made her way to the central stairs, which she descended slowly, in disappointment, enviously observing the people who were going up, carrying collapsible canvas stools on which they would sit, losing themselves in their contemplation of the pictures. Salvador Dali passed her, going quickly down. At the telephone booths, she hesitated, so sharply lonely that she almost looked for her address book, and she did take out a coin, but she put it back and pressed forlornly forward against the incoming tide. Suddenly, at the storm doors, she heard a whistle and she turned sharply, knowing that it would be Eisenburg, as, of course, it was, and he wore an incongruous smile upon his long, El Greco face. He took her hand and gravely asked her where she had been all this year and how she happened to be here, of all places, of all days. Emma replied distractedly, looking at his seedy clothes, his shaggy hair, the green cast of his white skin, his deep black eyes, in which all the feelings were disheveled, tattered, and held together only by the merest faith that change had to come. His hand was warm and her own seemed to cling to it and all their mutual necessity seemed centered here in their clasped hands. And there was no doubt about it; he had heard of her collapse and he saw in her face that she had heard of his. Their recognition of each other was instantaneous and absolute, for they cunningly saw that they were children and that, if they wished, they were free for the rest of this winter Sunday to play together, quite naked, quite innocent. "What a day it isl What a place!" said Alfred Eisenburg. "Can I buy you a drink, Emma? Have you time?"

She did not accept at once; she guardedly inquired where they could go from here, for it was an unlikely neighborhood for the sort of place she wanted. But they were en rapport, and he,

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wanting to avoid the grownups as much as she, said they would go across to Lexington. He needed a drink after an afternoon like this—didn't she? Oh, Lord, yes, she did, and she did not question what he meant by "an afternoon like this" but said that she would be delighted to go, even though they would have to walk on eggs all the way from the Museum to the place where the bottle was, the peace pipe on Lexington. Actually, there was nothing to fear; even if they had heard catcalls, or if someone had hooted at them, "Intellectual loves Rube!" they would have been impervious, for the heart carved in the bark of the apple tree would contain the names Emma and Alfred, and there were no perquisites to such a conjugation. To her own heart, which was shaped exactly like a valentine, there came a winglike palpitation, a delicate exigency, and all the fragrance of all the flowery springtime love affairs that ever were seemed waiting for them in the whisky bottle. To mingle their pain, their handshake had promised them, was to produce a separate entity, like a child that could shift for itself, and they scrambled hastily toward this profound and pastoral experience.

^ ^ *

Beatrice Trueblood's Story

When Beatrice Trueblood was in her middle thirties and on the very eve of her second marriage, to a rich and reliable man-when, that is, she was in the prime of life and on the threshold of a rosier phase of it than she had ever known before—she overnight was stricken with total deafness.

"The vile unkindness of fate!" cried Mrs. Onslager, the hostess on whose royal Newport lawn, on a summer day at lunch-time, poor Beatrice had made her awful discovery. Mrs. Onslager was addressing a group of house guests a few weeks after the catastrophe and after the departure of its victim—or, more properly, of its victims, since Marten ten Brink, Mrs. Trueblood's fiance^, had been there, too. The guests were sitting on the same lawn on the same sort of dapper afternoon, and if the attitudes of some of Mrs. Onslager's audience seemed to be somnolent, they were so because the sun was so taming and the sound of the waves was a glamorous lullaby as the Atlantic kneaded the rocks toward which the lawn sloped down. They were by no means indifferent to this sad story; a few of them knew Marten ten Brink, and all of them knew Beatrice Trueblood, who had been Mrs. Onslager's best friend since their girlhood in St. Louis.

"I'm obliged to call it fate," continued Mrs. Onslager. "Because there's nothing wrong with her. All the doctors have reported the same thing to us, and she's been to a battalion of them. At first she refused to go to anyone on the ground that it would be a waste of money, of which she has next to none, but Jack and I finally persuaded her that if she didn't see the best men in the country and let us foot the bills, we'd look on it as unfriendliness. So, from Johns Hopkins, New York Hospital, the Presbyterian, the Leahy Clinic, and God knows where, the same

account comes back: there's nothing physical to explain it, no disease, no lesion, there's been no shock, there were no hints of any kind beforehand. And /'// not allow the word 'psychosomatic' to be uttered in my presence—not in this connection, at any rate— because I know Bea as well as I know myself and she is not hysterical. Therefore, it has to be fate. And there's a particularly spiteful irony in it if you take a backward glance at her life. If ever a woman deserved a holiday from tribulation, it's Bea. There was first of all a positively hideous childhood. The classic roles were reversed in the family, and it was the mother who drank and the father who nagged. Her brother took to low life like a duck to water and was a juvenile delinquent before he was out of knickers—I'm sure he must have ended up in Alcatraz. They were unspeakably poor, and Bea's aunts dressed her in their hand-me-downs. It was a house of the most humiliating squalor, all terribly genteel. You know what I mean—the mother prettying up her drunkenness by those transparent dodges like 'Two's my limit,' and keeping the gin in a Waterford decanter, and the father looking as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth when they were out together publicly, although everyone knew that he was a perfectly ferocious tartar. Perhaps it isn't true that he threw things at his wife and children and whipped them with a razor strop—he didn't have to, because he could use his tongue like a bludgeon. And then after all that horror, Bea married Tom Trueblood—really to escape her family, I think, because she couldn't possibly have loved him. I mean it isn't possible to love a man who is both a beast and a fool. He was drunker than her mother ever thought of being; he was obscene, he was raucous, his infidelities to that good, beautiful girl were of a vulgarity that caused the mind to boggle. I'll never know how she managed to live with him for seven mortal years. And then at last, after all those tempests, came Marten ten Brink, like redemption itself. There's nothing sensational in Marten, I'll admit. He's rather a stick, he was born rather old, he's rather jokeless and bossy. But, oh, Lord, he's so safe, he was so protective of her, and he is so scrumptiously rich! And two months before the wedding this thunderbolt comes out of nowhere. It's indecent! It makes me so angry!" And this faithful friend shook

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her pretty red head rapidly in indignation, as if she were about to hunt down fate with a posse and hale it into court.

"Are you saying that the engagement has been broken?" asked Jennie Fowler, who had just got back from Europe and to whom all this was news.

Mrs. Onslager nodded, closing her eyes as if the pain she suffered were unbearable. "They'd been here for a week, Marten and Bea, and we were making the wedding plans, since they were to be married from my house. And the very day after this gruesome thing happened, she broke the engagement. She wrote him a note and sent it in to his room by one of the maids. I don't know what she said in it, though I suppose she told him she didn't want to be a burden, something like that—much more gracefully, of course, since Bea is the soul of courtesy. But whatever it was, it must have been absolutely unconditional, because he went back to town before dinner the same night. The letter I got from him afterward scarcely mentioned it—he only said he was sorry his visit here had ended on 'an unsettling note.' I daresay he was still too shocked to say more."

"Hard lines on ten Brink," said Harry McEvoy, who had never married.

"What do you mean, 'hard lines on ten Brink?*" cried Mrs. Fowler, who had married often, and equally often had gone, livid with rage, to Nevada.

"Well, if he was in love with her, if he counted on this . . . Not much fun to have everything blow up in your face. Lucky in a way, I suppose, that it happened before, and not afterward."

The whole party glowered at McEvoy, but he was entirely innocent of their disapproval and of his stupidity that had provoked it, since he was looking through a pair of binoculars at a catboat that seemed to be in trouble.

"If he was in love with her," preached Mrs. Fowler rabidly, "he would have stuck by her. He would have refused to let her break the engagement. He would have been the one to insist on the specialists, he would have moved heaven and earth, instead of which he fled like a scared rabbit at the first sign of bad luck. I thought he was only a bore—I didn't know he was such a venomous pill."

"No, dear, he isn't that," said Priscilla Onslager. "Not the most sensitive man alive, but I'd never call him a venomous pill. After all, remember it was she who dismissed him."

"Yes, but if he'd had an ounce of manliness in him, he would have put up a fight. No decent man, no manly man, would abandon ship at a time like that." Mrs. Fowler hated men so passionately that no one could dream why she married so many of them.

"Has it occurred to any of you that she sent him packing because she didn't want to marry him?" The question came from Douglas Clyde, a former clergyman, whose worldliness, though it was very wise, had cost him his parish and his cloth.

"Certainly not," said Priscilla. "I tell you, Doug, I know Bea. But at the moment the important thing isn't the engagement, because I'm sure it could be salvaged if she could be cured. And how's she to be cured if nothing's wrong? I'd gladly have the Eumenides chase me for a while if they'd only give her a rest."

Jack Onslager gazed through half-closed eyes at his wholesome, gabbling wife—he loved her very much, but her public dicta were always overwrought and nearly always wrong—and then he closed his eyes tight against the cluster of his guests, and he thought how blessed it would be if with the same kind of simple physical gesture one could also temporarily close one's ears. One could decline to touch, to taste, to see, but it required a skill he had not mastered to govern the ears. Those stopples made of wax and cotton would be insulting at a party; besides, they made him claustrophobic, and when he used them, he could hear the interior workings of his skull, the boiling of his brains in his brainpan, a rustling behind his jaws. He would not like to go so far as Beatrice had gone, but he would give ten years of his life (he had been about to say he would give his eyes and changed it) to be able, when he wanted, to seal himself into an impenetrable silence.

To a certain extent, however, one could insulate the mind against the invasion of voices by an act of will, by causing them to blur together into a general hubbub. And this is what he did now; in order to consider Mrs. Trueblood's deafness, he deafened himself to the people who were talking about it. He thought

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of the day in the early summer when the extraordinary thing had taken place.

It had been Sunday. The night before, the Onslagers and their houseparty—the young Allinghams, Mary and Leon Herbert, Beatrice and ten Brink—had gone to a ball. It was the kind of party to which Onslager had never got used, although he had been a multimillionaire for twenty years and not only had danced through many such evenings but had been the host at many more, in his own houses or in blazoned halls that he had hired. He was used to opulence in other ways, and took for granted his boats and horses and foreign cars. He also took for granted, and was bored by, most of the rites of the rich: the formal dinner parties at which the protocol was flawlessly maneuvered and conversation moved on stilts and the food was platitudinous; evenings of music to benefit a worthy cause (How papery the turkey always was at the buffet supper after the Grieg!); the tea parties to which one went obediently to placate old belles who had lost their looks and their husbands and the roles that, at their first assembly, they had assumed they would play forever. Well-mannered and patient, Onslager did his duty suavely, and he was seldom thrilled.

But these lavish, enormous midsummer dancing parties in the fabulous, foolish villas on Bellevue Avenue and along the Ocean Drive did make his backbone tingle, did make him glow. Even when he was dancing, or proposing a toast, or fetching a wrap for a woman who had found the garden air too cool, he always felt on these occasions that he was static, looking at a colossal tableau vivant that would vanish at the wave of a magic golden wand. He was bewitched by the women, by all those soignee or demure or jubilant or saucy or dreaming creatures in their caressing, airy dresses and their jewels whose priceless hearts flashed in the light from superb chandeliers. They seemed, these dancing, laughing, incandescent goddesses, to move in inaccessible spheres; indeed, his wife, Priscilla, was transfigured, and, dancing with her, he was moon-struck. No matter how much he drank (the champagne of those evenings was invested with a special property—one tasted the grapes, and the grapes had come from celestial vineyards), he remained sober and amazed and, in

spite of his amazement, so alert that he missed nothing and recorded everything. He did not fail to see, in looks and shrugs and the clicking of glasses, the genesis of certain adulteries, and the demise of others in a glance of contempt or an arrogant withdrawal. With the accuracy of the uninvolved bystander, he heard and saw among these incredible women moving in the aura of their heady perfume their majestic passions—tragic heartbreak, sublime fulfillment, dangerous jealousy, the desire to murder. When, on the next day, he had come back to earth, he would reason that his senses had devised a fiction to amuse his mind, and that in fact he had witnessed nothing grander than flirtations and impromptu pangs as ephemeral as the flowers in the supper room.

So, at the Paines' vast marble house that night, Onslager, aloof and beguiled as always, had found himself watching Beatrice Trueblood and Marten ten Brink with so much interest that whenever he could he guided his dancing partner near them, and if they left the ballroom for a breath of air on a bench beside a playing fountain, or for a glass of champagne, he managed, if he could do so without being uncivil to his interlocutor and without being observed by them, to excuse himself and follow. If he had stopped to think, this merciful and moral man would have been ashamed of his spying and eavesdropping, but morality was irrelevant to the spell that enveloped him. Besides, he felt invisible.

Consequently, he knew something about that evening that Priscilla did not know and that he had no intention of telling her, partly because she would not believe him, partly because she would be displeased at the schoolboyish (and parvenu) way he put in his time at balls. The fact was that the betrothed were having a quarrel. He heard not a word of it—not at the dance, that is—and he saw not a gesture or a grimace of anger, but he nevertheless knew surely, as he watched them dance together, that ten Brink was using every ounce of his strength not to shout, and to keep in check a whole menagerie of passions—fire-breathing dragons and bone-crushing serpents and sabertoothed tigers— and he knew also that Beatrice was running for dear life against the moment when they would be unleashed, ready to gobble her up. Her broad, wide-eyed, gentle face was so still it could have

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been a painting of a face that had been left behind when the woman who owned it had faded from view, and Bea's golden hand lay on ten Brink's white sleeve as tentatively as a butterfly. Her lover's face, on the other hand, was—Onslager wanted to say "writhing," and the long fingers of the hand that pressed against her back were splayed out and rigid, looking grafted onto the sunny flesh beneath the diaphanous blue stuff of her dress. He supposed that another observer might with justification have said that the man was animated and that his fiancee was becomingly engrossed in all he said, that ten Brink was in a state of euphoria as his wedding approached, while Beatrice moved in a wordless haze of happiness. He heard people admiringly remark on the compatibility of their good looks; they were said to look as if they were "dancing on air"; women thanked goodness that Mrs. Trueblood had come at last into a safe harbor, and men said that ten Brink was in luck.

As soon as the Onslagers and their guests had driven away from the ball and the last echo of the music had perished and the smell of roses had been drowned by the smell of the sea and the magic had started to wane from Onslager's blood, he began to doubt his observations. He was prepared to elide and then forget his heightened insights, as he had always done in the past. The group had come in two cars, and the Allinghams were with him and Priscilla on the short ride home. Lucy Allingham, whose own honeymoon was of late and blushing memory, said, with mock petulance, 'I thought young love was supposed to be what caught the eye. But I never saw anything half so grand and wonderful as the looks of those two." And Priscilla said, "How true! How magnificently right you are, Lucy I They were radiant, both of them."

Late as it was, Priscilla proposed a last drink and a recapitulation of the party—everyone had found it a joy—but ten Brink said, "Beatrice and I want to go down and have a look at the waves, if you don't mind," and when no one minded but, on the contrary, fondly sped them on their pastoral way, the two walked down across the lawn and presently were gone from sight in the romantic mist. Their friends watched them and sighed, charmed, and went inside to drink a substitute for nectar.

Hours later (he looked at his watch and saw that it was close

on five o'clock), Jack woke, made restless by something he had sensed or dreamed, and, going to the east windows of his bedroom to look at the water and see what the sailing would be like that day, he was arrested by the sight of Beatrice and Marten standing on the broad front steps below. They were still in their evening clothes. Beatrice's stance was tired; she looked bedraggled. They stood confronting each other beside the balustrade; ten Brink held her shoulders tightly, his sharp, handsome (but, thought Onslager suddenly, Mephistophelean) face bent down to hers.

"You mustn't think you can shut your mind to these things," he said. "You can't shut your ears to them." Their voices were clear in the hush of the last of the night.

"I am exhausted with talk, Marten," said Beatrice softly. "I will not hear another word."

An hour afterward, the fairest of days dawned on Newport, and Jack Onslager took out his sloop by himself in a perfect breeze, so that he saw none of his guests until just before lunch, when he joined them for cocktails on the lawn. Everyone was there except Beatrice Trueblood, who had slept straight through the morning but a moment before had called down from her windows that she was nearly ready. It was a flawless day to spend beside the sea: the chiaroscuro of the elm trees and the sun on the broad, buoyant lawn shifted as the sea winds disarrayed the leaves, and yonder, on the hyacinthine water, the whitecaps shuddered and the white sails swelled; to the left of the archipelago of chairs and tables where they sat, Mrs. Onslager's famous rosary was heavily in bloom with every shade of red there was and the subtlest hues of yellow, and her equally famous blue hydrangeas were at their zenith against the house, exactly the color of this holiday sky, so large they nodded on their stems like drowsing heads.

The Allinghams, newly out of their families' comfortable houses in St. Louis and now living impecuniously in a railroad flat in New York that they found both adventurous and odious, took in the lawn and seascape with a look of real greed, and even of guile, on their faces, as if they planned to steal something or eat forbidden fruit.

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In its pleasurable fatigue from the evening before and too much sleep this morning, the gathering was momentarily disinclined to conversation, and they all sat with faces uplifted and eyes closed against the sun. They listened to the gulls and terns shrieking with their evergreen gluttony; they heard the buzz-saw rasp of outboard motors and the quick, cleaving roar of an invisible jet; they heard automobiles on the Ocean Drive, a power mower nasally shearing the grass at the house next door, and from that house they heard, as well, the wail of an infant and the panicky barking of an infant dog.

"I wish this day would never end," said Lucy Allingham. "This is the kind of day when you want to kiss the earth. You want to have an affair with the sky."

"Don't be maudlin, Lucy," said her husband. "And above all, don't be inaccurate." He was a finicking young cub who had been saying things like this all weekend.

Onslager's own wife, just as foolishly given to such figures of speech but with a good deal more style, simply through being older, said, "Look, here comes Beatrice. She looks as if her eyes were fixed on the Garden of Eden before the Fall and as if she were being serenaded by angels."

Marten ten Brink, an empiricist not given to flights of fancy, said, "Is that a depth bomb I hear?"

No one answered him, for everyone was watching Beatrice as she came slowly, smiling, down the stone steps from the terrace and across the lawn, dulcifying the very ground she walked upon. She was accompanied by Mrs. Onslager's two Siamese cats, who cantered ahead of her, then stopped, forgetful of their intention, and closely observed the life among the blades of grass, then frolicked on, from time to time emitting that ugly parody of a human cry that is one of the many facets of the Siamese cat's scornful nature. But the insouciant woman paid no attention to them, even when they stopped to fight each other, briefly, with noises straight from Hell.

"You look as fresh as dew, dear," said Priscilla. "Did you simply sleep and sleep?"

"Where on earth did you get that fabric?" asked Mrs. Herbert. "Surely not here. It must have come from Paris. Bea, I do declare your clothes are always the ones I want for myself."

"Sit here, Beatrice," said ten Brink, who had stood up and was indicating the chair next to himself. But Beatrice, ignoring him, chose another chair. The cats, still flirting with her, romped at her feet; one of them pretended to find a sporting prey between her instep and her heel, and he pounced and buck-jumped silently, his tail a fast, fierce whip. Beatrice, who delighted in these animals, bent down to stroke the lean flanks of the other one, momentarily quiescent in a glade of sunshine.

"What do you think of the pathetic fallacy, Mrs. True-blood?" said Peter Allingham, addressing her averted head. "Don't you think it's pathetic?" By now, Onslager was wishing to do him bodily harm for his schoolmasterish teasing of Lucy.

"Monkeys," murmured Beatrice to the cats. "Darlings."

"Beatrice!" said Marten ten Brink sharply, and strode across to whisper something in her ear. She brushed him away as if he were a fly, and she straightened up and said to Priscilla Onslager, "Why is everyone so solemn? Are you doing a charade of a Quaker meeting?"

"Solemn?" said Priscilla, with a laugh. "If we seem solemn, it's because we're all smitten with this day. Isn't it supreme? Heaven can't possibly be nicer."

"Is this a new game?" asked Beatrice, puzzled, her kind eyes on her hostess's face.

"Is what a new game, dear?"

"What if going on?" She had begun to be ever so slightly annoyed. "Is it some sort of silence test? We're to see if we can keep still till teatime? Is it that? I'd be delighted—only, for pity's sake, tell me the rules and the object."

"Silence test! Sweetheart, you're still asleep. Give her a martini, Jack," said Priscilla nervously, and to divert the attention of the company from her friend's quixotic mood she turned to ten Brink. "I believe you're right," she said, "I believe they're detonating depth bombs. Why on Sunday? I thought sailors got a day of rest like everybody else."

A deep, rumbling subterranean thunder rolled, it seemed, beneath the chairs they sat on.

"It sounds like ninepins in the Catskills," said Priscilla.

"I never could abide that story," said Mary Herbert. "Or the Ichabod Crane one, either."

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Jack Onslager, his back toward the others as he poured a drink for Beatrice, observed to himself that the trying thing about these weekends was not the late hours, not the overeating and the overdrinking and the excessive batting of tennis balls and shuttlecocks; it was, instead, this kind of aimless prattle that never ceased. There seemed to exist, on weekends in the country, a universal terror of pauses in conversation* so that it was imperative for Mary Herbert to drag in Washington Irving by the hair of his irrelevant head. Beatrice Trueblood, however, was not addicted to prattle, and he silently congratulated her on the way, in the last few minutes, she had risen above their fatuous questions and compliments. That woman was as peaceful as a pool in the heart of a forest. He turned to her, handing her the drink and looking directly into her eyes (blue and green, like an elegant tropic sea), and he said, "I have never seen you looking prettier."

For just a second, a look of alarm usurped her native and perpetual calm, but then she said, "So you're playing it, too. I don't think it's fair not to tell me—unless this is a joke on me. Am I 'it'?"

At last, Jack was unsettled; Priscilla was really scared; ten Brink was angry, and, getting up again to stand over her like a prosecuting attorney interrogating a witness of bad character, he said, "You're not being droll, Beatrice, you're being tiresome."

Mrs. Onslager said, "Did you go swimming this morning, lamb? Perhaps you got water in your ears. Lean over—see, like this," and she bent her head low to the left and then to the right while Beatrice, to whom these calisthenics were inexplicable, watched her, baffled.

Beatrice put her drink on the coffee table, and she ran her forefingers around the shells of her ears. What was the look that came into her face, spreading over it as tangibly as a blush? Onslager afterward could not be sure. At the time he had thought it was terror; he had thought this because, in the confusion that ensued, he had followed, sheeplike with the others, in his wife's lead. But later, when he recaptured it for long reflection, he thought that it had not been terror, but rather that Priscilla in naming it that later was actually speaking of the high color of her own state of mind, and that the look in Beatrice's eyes and

on her mouth had been one of revelation, as if she had opened a door and had found behind it a new world so strange, so foreign to all her knowledge and her experience and the history of her senses, that she had spoken only approximately when, in a far, soft, modest voice, she said, "I am deaf. That explains it."

When Onslager had come to the end of his review of those hours of that other weekend and had returned to the present one, he discovered that he had so effectively obliterated the voices around him that he now could not recall a single word of any of the talk, although he had been conscious of it, just as some part of his mind was always conscious of the tension and solution of the tides.

"But you haven't told us yet how she's taking it now," Mrs. Fowler was saying.

"I can't really tell," replied Priscilla. "I haven't been able to go to town to see her, and she refuses to come up here—the place probably has bad associations for her now. And I'm no good at reading between the lines of her letters. She has adjusted to it, I'll say that." Priscilla was thoughtful, and her silence commanded her guests to be silent. After a time, she went on, "I'll say more than that. I'll say she has adjusted too well for my liking. There is a note of gaiety in her letters—she is almost jocose. For example, in the last one she said that although she had lost Handel and music boxes and the purring of my Siamese, she had gained a valuable immunity to the voices of professional Irishmen."

"Does she mention ten Brink?" asked someone.

"Never," said Priscilla. "It's as if he had never existed. There's more in her letters than the joking tone. I wish I could put my finger on it. The closest I can come is to say she sounds bemused/*

"Do you think she's given up?" asked Jennie Fowler. "Or has she done everything there is to be done?"

"The doctors recommended psychiatry, of course," said Priscilla, with distaste. "It's a dreary, ghastly, humiliating thought, but I suppose—"

"I should think you would suppose!" cried Mrs. Fowler. "You shouldn't leave a stone unturned. Plainly someone's got to

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make her go to an analyst. They're not that dire, Priscilla. I've heard some very decent things about several of them."

"It won't be I who'll make her go," said Priscilla, sighing. "I disapprove too much."

"But you don't disapprove of the medical people," persisted Jennie. "Why fly in the face of their prescription?"

"Because ... I couldn't do it. Propose to Beatrice that she is mental? I can't support the thought of it."

"Then Jack must do it," said the managerial divorcee. "Jack must go straight down to town and get her to a good man and then patch up things with Marten ten Brink. I still detest the sound of him, but de gustibus, and I think she ought to have a husband."

The whole gathering—even the cynical ex-pastor—agreed that this proposal made sense, and Onslager, while he doubted his right to invade Bea's soft and secret and eccentric world, found himself so curious to see her again to learn whether some of his conjectures were right that he fell in with the plan and agreed to go to New York in the course of the week. As, after lunch, they dispersed, some going off for boccie and others to improve their shining skin with sun, Douglas Clyde said sotto voce to Onslager, "Why doesn't it occur to anyone but you and me that perhaps she doesn't want to hear?"

Startled, the host turned to his guest. "How did you know I thought that?"

"I watched you imitating deafness just now," said the other. "You looked beatific. But if I were you, I wouldn't go too far."

"Then you believe . . . contrary to Priscilla and her Eumeni-des . . . ?"

"I believe what you believe—that the will is free and very .strong," Clyde answered, and he added, "I believe further that it can cease to be an agent and become a despot. I suspect hers has."

Mrs. Trueblood lived in the East Seventies, in the kind of apartment building that Jack Onslager found infinitely more melancholy than the slum tenements that flanked and faced it in the sultry city murk of August. It was large and new and commonplace and jerry-built, although it strove to look as solid as

Gibraltar. Its brick facade was an odious mustardy brown. The doorman was fat and choleric, and when Onslager descended from his cab, he was engaged in scolding a band of vile-looking little boys who stood on the curb doubled up with giggles, now and again screaming out an unbelievable obscenity when the pain of their wicked glee abated for a moment. A bum was lying spread-eagled on the sidewalk a few doors down; his face was bloody but he was not dead, for he was snoring fearsomely. Across the street, a brindle boxer leaned out a window, his fore-paws sedately crossed on the sill in a parody of the folded arms of the many women who were situated in other windows, irascibly agreeing with one another at the tops of their voices that the heat was hell.

But the builders of the house where Mrs. Trueblood lived had pretended that none of this was so; they had pretended that the neighborhood was bourgeois and there was no seamy side, and they had commemorated their swindle in a big facsimile of rectitude. Its square foyer was papered with a design of sanitary ferns upon a field of hygenic beige; two untruthful mirrors mirrored each other upon either lateral wall, and beneath them stood love seats with aseptic green plastic cushions and straight blond legs. The slow self-service elevator was an asphyxiating chamber with a fan that blew a withering sirocco; its tinny walls were embossed with a meaningless pattern of fleurs-de-lis; light, dim and reluctant, came through a fixture with a shade of some ersatz material made esoterically in the form of a starfish. As Onslager ascended to the sixth floor at a hot snail's pace, hearing alarming rales and exhalations in the machinery, he was fretful with his discomfort and fretful with snobbishness. He deplored the circumstances that required Beatrice, who was so openhearted a woman, to live in surroundings so mean-minded; he could not help thinking sorrowfully that the ideal place for her was Marten ten Brink's house on Fifty-fifth Street, with all its depths of richness and its sophisticated planes. The bastard, he thought, taking Jennie Fowler's line—why did he let her down? And then he shook his head, because, of course, he knew it hadn't been like that.

This was not his first visit to Beatrice. He and Priscilla had been here often to cocktail parties since she had lived in New

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York, but the place had made no impression on him; he liked cocktail parties so little that he went to them with blinders on and looked at nothing except, furtively, his watch. But today, in the middle of a hostile heat wave and straight from the felicities of Newport, he was heavyhearted thinking how her apartment was going to look; he dreaded it; he wished he had not come. He was struck suddenly with the importunity of his mission. How had they dared be so possessive and dictatorial? And why had he been delegated to urge her to go to a psychiatrist? To be sure, his letter to her had said only that since he was going to be in the city, he would like to call on her, but she was wise and sensitive and she was bound to know that he had come to snoop and recommend. He was so embarrassed that he considered going right down again and sending her some flowers and a note of apology for failing to show up. She could not know he was on his way, for it had not been possible to announce himself over the house telephone—and how, indeed, he wondered, would she know when her doorbell rang?

But when the doors of the elevator slid open, he found her standing in the entrace of her apartment. She looked at her watch and said, "You're punctual." Her smiling, welcoming face was cool and tranquil; unsmirched by the heat and the dreariness of the corridor and, so far as he could judge, by the upheaval of her life, she was as proud and secret-living as a flower. He admired her and he dearly loved her. He cherished her as one of life's most beautiful appointments.

"That you should have to come to town on such a day!" she exclaimed. "I'm terribly touched that you fitted me in."

He started to speak; he was on the point of showering on her a cornucopia of praise and love, and then he remembered that she would not hear. So, instead, he kissed her on either cheek and hoped the gesture, mild and partial, obscured his turmoil. She smelled of roses; she seemed the embodiment of everything most pricelessly feminine, and he felt as diffident as he did at those lovely summer balls.

Her darkened, pretty sitting room—he should not have been so fearful, he should have had more faith in her—smelled of roses, too, for everywhere there were bowls of them from Priscilla's garden, brought down by the last weekend's guests.

"I'm terribly glad you fitted me in," repeated Beatrice when she had given him a drink, and a pad of paper and a pencil, by means of which he was to communicate with her (she did this serenely and without explanation, as if it were the most natural thing in the world), "because yesterday my bravura began to peter out. In fact, I'm scared to death."

He wrote, "You shouldn't be alone. Why not come back to us? You know nothing would please us more." How asinine, he thought. What a worthless sop.

She laughed. "Priscilla couldn't bear it. Disaster makes her cry, good soul that she is. No, company wouldn't make me less scared."

"Tell me about it," he wrote, and again he felt like a fool.

It was not the deafness itself that scared her, she said—not the fear of being run down by an automobile she had not heard or violated by an intruder whose footfall had escaped her. These anxieties, which beset Priscilla, did not touch Beatrice. Nor had she yet begun so very much to miss voices or other sounds she liked; it was a little unnerving, she said, never to know if the telephone was ringing, and it was strange to go into the streets and see the fast commotion and hear not a sound, but it had its comic side and it had its compensations—it amused her to see the peevish snapping of a dog whose bark her deafness had forever silenced, she was happy to be spared her neighbors' vociferous television sets. But she was scared all the same. What had begun to harry her was that her wish to be deaf had been granted. This was exactly how she put it, and Onslager received her secret uneasily. She had not bargained for banishment, she said; she had only wanted a holiday. Now, though, she felt that the Devil lived with her, eternally wearing a self-congratulatory smile.

"You are being fanciful," Onslager wrote, although he did not think she was at all fanciful. "You can't wish yourself deaf."

But Beatrice insisted that she had done just that.

She emphasized that she had elected to hear no more, would not permit of accident, and ridiculed the doting Priscilla's sentimental fate. She had done it suddenly and out of despair, and she was sorry now. "I am ashamed. It was an act of cowardice," she said.

"How cowardice?" wrote Onslager.

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"1 could have broken with Marten in a franker way. I could simply have told him I had changed my mind. I didn't have to make him mute by making myself deaf."

"Was there a quarrel?" he wrote, knowing already the question was superfluous.

"Not a quarrel. An incessant wrangle. Marten is jealous and he is indefatigably vocal. I wanted terribly to marry him—I don't suppose I loved him very much but he seemed good, seemed safe. But all of a sudden I thought, I cannot and I will not listen to another word. And now I'm sorry because I'm so lonely here, inside my skull. Not hearing makes one helplessly egocentric."

She hated any kind of quarrel, she said—she shuddered at raised voices and quailed before looks of hate—but she could better endure a howling brawl among vicious hoodlums, a shrill squabble of shrews, a degrading jangle between servant and mistress, than she could the least altercation between a man and a woman whose conjunction had had as its origin tenderness and a concord of desire. A relationship that was predicated upon love was far too delicate of composition to be threatened by cross-purposes. There were houses where she would never visit again because she had seen a husband and wife in ugly battle dress; there were restaurants she went to unwillingly because in them she had seen lovers in harsh dispute. How could things ever be the same between them again? How could two people possibly continue to associate with each other after such humiliating, disrobing displays?

As Beatrice talked in discreet and general terms and candidly met Jack Onslager's eyes, in another part of her mind she was looking down the shadowy avenue of all the years of her life. As a girl and, before that, as a child, in the rambling, shambling house in St. Louis, Beatrice in her bedroom doing her lessons would hear a rocking chair on a squeaking board two flights down; this was the chair in which her tipsy mother seesawed, dressed for the street and wearing a hat, drinking gin and humming a Venetian barcarole to which she had forgotten the words. Her mother drank from noon, when, with lamentations, she got up, till midnight, when, the bottle dry, she fell into a groaning, nightmare-ridden unconsciousness that resembled the condition

immediately preceding death. This mortal sickness was terrifying; her removal from reality was an ordeal for everyone, but not even the frequent and flamboyant threats of suicide, the sobbed proclamations that she was the chief of sinners, not all the excruciating embarrassments that were created by that interminable and joyless spree, were a fraction as painful as the daily quarrels that commenced as soon as Beatrice's father came home, just before six, and continued, unmitigated, until he—a methodical man, despite his unfathomable spleen—went to bed, at ten. Dinner, nightly, was a hideous experience for a child, since the parents were not inhibited by their children or the maid and went on heaping atrocious abuse upon each other, using sarcasm, threats, lies—every imaginable expression of loathing and contempt. They swam in their own blood, but it was an ocean that seemed to foster and nourish them; their awful wounds were their necessities. Freshly appalled each evening, unforgiving, disgraced, Beatrice miserably pushed her food about on her plate, never hungry, and often she imagined herself alone on a desert, far away from any human voice. The moment the meal was finished, she fled to her schoolbooks, but even when she put her fingers in her ears, she could hear her parents raving, whining, bullying, laughing horrible, malign laughs. Sometimes, in counterpoint to this vendetta, another would start in the kitchen, where the impudent and slatternly maid and one of her lovers would ask their cross questions and give crooked answers.