“Yep, he was taking a big chance there,” said Rattner, “knowing that I had been such an intimate friend.’’
“But you had already told him you hadn’t seen each other since you were buddies together, don’t forget that. Why he could have given him not only a wife but a half dozen children besides—you wouldn’t be able to disprove it. Anyway, that’s one thing we can check up on. I do wish you’d write to your friend and see if he knows this guy or not.”
“You bet I will,” said Rattner, getting out of bed at once and looking for his notebook. “You’ve got me all worked up about it now. Jesus, what licks me is that you could have entertained such suspicions and listened to him the way you did. You looked at him as though he were handing you the Gospel. I didn’t know you were such an actor.”
“I’m not,” I hastened to put in. “At the time I really believed every word he was telling us. Or, to be more exact, I never stopped to think whether what he was saying was so or not so.
When a story is good I listen, and if it develops afterwards that it was a lie why so much the better—I like a good lie just as much as the truth. A story is a story, whether it’s based on fact or fancy.”
“Now I’d like to ask you a question,” Rattner put in. “Why do you suppose he was so sore at Roosevelt?”
“I don’t think he was half so sore as he pretended to be,” I answered promptly. “I think his sole motive for introducing Roosevelt’s name was to get us to listen to that scurrilous poem he had cooked up. You noticed, I hope, that there was no comparison between the two poems.
He wrote the one on Roosevelt, that I’m positive of. Only a bar-fly could cook up such ingenious nonsense. He probably hasn’t anything against Roosevelt. He wanted us to admire the poem and then, failing to get a reaction from us, he got his wires crossed and connected Roosevelt with Woodrow Wilson, the demon who sent him to hell.”
“He certainly had a vicious look when he was talking about the war,” said Rattner. “I don’t doubt him for a minute when he said he had murdered plenty of men. I wouldn’t want to run across him in the dark when he was in a bad mood.”
“Yes, there I agree with you,” I said. “I think the reason he was so bitter about killing was that he was a killer himself . . . I was almost going to say a killer by nature, but I take that back.
What I do think, though, is that the experience in the trenches often brings out the killer in a man. We’re all killers, only most of us never get a chance to cultivate the germ. The worst killers, of course, are the ones who stay at home. They can’t help it, either. The soldier gets a chance to vent his feelings, but the man who stays at home has no outlet for his passions.
They ought to kill off the newspaper men right at the start, that’s my idea. Those are the men who inspire the killing. Hitler is a pure, clean-hearted idealist compared to those birds. I don’t mean the correspondents. I mean the editors and the stuffed shirts who order the editors to write the poison that they hand out.”
“You know,” said Rattner, in a soft, reflective voice, “there was only one man I felt like killing when I was in the service—and that was the lieutenant, the second-lieutenant, of our company.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “I’ve heard that same story a thousand times. And it’s always a lieutenant. Nobody with any self-respect wants to be a lieutenant. They all have inferiority complexes. Many of them get shot in the back, I’m told.”
“Worse than that sometimes,” said Rattner. “This chap I’m telling you about, why I can’t imagine anyone being hated more than he was—not only by us but by his superiors. The officers loathed him. Anyway, let me finish telling you about him. . . . You see, when we were finally demobilized everybody was gunning for him. I knew some fellows who came all the way to New York from Texas and California to look him up and take a poke at him.
And when I say a poke I don’t mean just a poke—I mean to beat the piss out of him. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but the story I heard later on was this, that he was beaten up so often and so badly that finally he changed his name and moved to another state. You can imagine what what’s his name would have done to a guy like that, can’t you? I don’t think he’s have bothered to soil his hands.
I think he’d have plugged him or else cracked him over the head with a bottle. And if he’d have had to swing for it I don’t think he would have batted an eyelash. Did you notice how smoothly he passed over that story about cracking a friend with a broken bottle?
He told it as though it were incidental to something else—it rang true to me. If it had been a lie he would have made more of it. But he told it as though he were neither ashamed nor proud of doing what he did. He was just giving us the facts, that’s all.”
I lay on my back, when we had ceased talking, with eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Certain phrases which our friend had dropped returned obsessively to plague me. The collection of vicepresidents of the United States, which he had so accurately described, was a most persistent image.
I was trying my damnedest to recall in what town I too had seen this collection in a drugstore window. Chattanooga, most likely. And yet it couldn’t have been Chattanooga either, because in the same window there was a large photograph of Lincoln. I remembered how my eye had flitted back and forth from the rogues’ gallery of vice-presidents to the portrait of Lincoln’s wife.
I had felt terribly sorry for Lincoln at that moment, not because he had been assassinated but because he had been saddled with that crazy bitch of a wife who almost drove him insane. Yes, as the woman from Georgia had said, we were trying to make a he-ro of him.
And yet for all the good he had tried to do he had caused a lot of harm. He almost wrecked the country. As for Lee, on the other hand, there was no division of opinion throughout the country as to the greatness of his soul. As time goes on the North becomes more enamored of him. . . . The killing—that’s what I couldn’t fathom.
What had it accomplished? I wondered if our friend had really gone up to the circle and held communion with the spirit of the man he revered. And then what? Then he had gone to a cheap lodging house and fought with the bed bugs until dawn, was that it?
And the next day and the day after? Legions of them floating around. And me priding myself on my detective ability, getting all worked up because I uncovered a few flaws in his story. A revolution of the heart!
Fine phrase, that, but meanwhile I’m lying comfortably between clean warm sheets. I’m lying here making emendations in his story so that when I come to put it down on paper it will sound more authentic than the authentic one. Trying to kid myself that if I tell the story real well perhaps it will make people more kindly and tolerant towards such poor devils.
Rot! All rot! There are the people who give and forgive without stint, without question, and there are the other kind who always know how to muster a thousand reasons for withholding their aid. The latter never graduate into the former class. Never.
The gulf between them is as wide as hell. One is born kind, indulgent, forgiving, tolerant, merciful. One isn’t made that way through religion or education. Carry it out to the year 56,927 A.D. and still there will be the two classes of men. And between the two there will always be a shadow world, the world of ghostly creatures who toss about in vain, walking the streets in torment while the world sleeps. . . .
It wasn’t so long ago that I was walking in that same shadow world myself. I used to walk around in the dead of night begging for coppers so that I could fill my empty belly. And one night in the rain, walking with head down and full of nothing but misery, I run plump into a man with a cape and an opera hat and in a faint, cheerless voice I beg in my customary way for a few pence.
And without stopping, without even looking at me, the man from the opera digs in his vest pocket, pulls out a handful of change and flings it at me. The money rolls all over the sidewalk and into the gutter.
Suddenly I straightened up, stiff and taut with anger. Suddenly I was completely out of the coma, snorting like a bull and ready to charge. I waved my fist and shouted in the direction the man had taken, but there was no sight or sound of him.
He had
