Chapter 41

Mr. Boone Havock, with Mr. Bradd Criley, his attorney, was attendant in the chambers of Judge Timberlane, in the matter of an injunction against the Sequoia & Hematite R.R.

The Judge and Mr. Criley, though they addressed each other by their first names, were so excessively courteous that Mr. Havock protested, “You boys are awful polite and helpful to each other today. What’s trouble? Been having a row?”

Bradd looked to Cass for a statement which might determine their relationship for many years, and Cass said thoughtfully, “Bradd is my friend, and you can’t row with a friend. You might murder him, but you couldn’t hurt him. If he did have any faults—no, if a man is your friend, he HAS no faults; he merely has oversights that you know he’ll correct when he gets around to it. That’s true, don’t you think, Bradd?”

“I hope it is—I’m sure it is!”

“God Almighty, you boys getting so noble on me about friendship! You’re lucky you ain’t in the contracting business! And since you’re so het up about friendship, Cass, strikes me you been neglecting your old friends, the Havocks, pretty bad, the past six months. It’s that wife of yours—elegant girl but God-awful snooty. Does she let you in under the rope, Bradd?”

“We’re on quite civil terms, I think. She is a very fine woman.”

“I guess too fine for us lumberjacks. She’s got every right to her opinions, but don’t let her take you away from us, Cass. We kind of need you around.”

Cass was so inept at the higher lying that he could only get back to the injunction. When they had finished and Boone was gone, Cass dropped his hand on Bradd’s shoulder and said, with no particular emphasis, “We want you to come to Christmas dinner. Very much.”

“You’re sure of it?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to. I’ll come and be glad to. And—Look, Cass. I’m never going to say another word about this, but you did exaggerate my feeling toward Jinny. If I was at fault it was just the ‘oversight’ you were speaking of. I have so much respect for Jinny’s integrity and so much appreciation of her humor that I showed it in a way that, I see now, might have been mistaken for a quite improper ardor. But nobody knows better than I do that she IS your wife. No, no, don’t say anything; I just wanted to make myself clear, and I hope that now we three can be friends again. Good night, ole man. Christmas dinner at three?”

Everything was normal and beautiful with this happy young couple, the Timberlanes, now, and there was obviously no reason why their heavenly bliss should not last forever.

Jinny was “taking care of herself”; she got nine hours of sleep, covered as warmly as the doctor advised, she eschewed pastry and looked with sniffs upon more than one cocktail a week. She welcomed Cass to her bed, and wound her arms about his tingling shoulders, and they so rejoiced again in bodily love that they even saw the cosmically bawdy humor in it.

As much as Cass, the reticent Jinny was offended by indecencies, yet she did see that it was demoralizingly funny when the embarrassed young Cass came in expectantly and had to be told that he and his poetic ardor were barred by the lunar rhythm.

She jeered at him then, but tenderly, and revealed the esoteric fact that every woman somehow expects her man to guess that obvious crisis without being told. He lay beside her, his cheek just touching her bare shoulder, and they laughed and were divinely content; the world shut out, the Bradd Crileys shut out, the Boone Havocks shut out, and the dusty court room and the bitter Northern winter and the ghastly speed with which, after you are twenty-five, the whole good day is only one hour long.

They were so commendable. Pricked by Boone’s protest, they had the Havocks and the Drovers and the Brightwings and the Reverend Gadds and the Prutts in for dinner. It wasn’t really so hard, you know; Jinny’s diabetes gave Cass an excuse to invite their guests to go home at ten o’clock.

Their Christmas was as hearty as though no war existed.

They drank lingeringly to all their friends in peril abroad, but then, as every civilian far enough from the battle has done in every war since Troy, they forgot it, and sang carols.

Any strain that might be left over between Bradd and the Timberlanes was wiped out in early January, when Bradd came in to say quietly that he was going to New York to live, permanently.

The Wargate Corporation had bought several plants in New England and New Jersey for its war materials: packing cases, wallboard for barracks, glider bodies, propellers, hulls. They had offices in New York; might even, in some day catastrophic for Grand Republic, move their headquarters there; and in New York they needed Bradd as legal adviser.

He said evenly, “I hate to say good-bye so informally—I think of you two as my dearest friends—but there’s a case on, and I have to grab a train tomorrow morning. My stuff will be sent on after me, when I get an apartment in New York. And I have to hustle over to Webb Wargate’s now. We have a conference that’ll take half the night. So good-bye, and come see me in New York, soon as you can. I’ll paint the town for you. And you have a perfectly swell husband, Jinny!”

He shook Cass’s hand, he hastily kissed Jinny, and he was gone.