Chapter 50

Cass was worried by the pointless possession of two houses. He could not give up the new house—it was hers—but as spring grudgingly came on and he took long walks, he was only too much attracted by Bergheim. He liked to go into that shuttered cavern and sit there, thinking about this whole madhouse of love.

—We’re so civilized now that we can kill our horrid enemies— year-old children—two hundred miles away, but nobody except a few rather loveless professors has even begun to understand love. Compared with our schools and churches, which are supposed to instruct our emotions, the shabbiest business, even advertising whisky, has been magnificent in its competence and integrity.

—In the future of married life, will men have to let their wives have as many lovers as they want? The men will hate it. I would hate it, bitterly. Yet all these ages women have hated their men making love to the gigglers. They’ve had to endure it. Is it our turn now? I don’t like it. But what has that to do with it.

—Will the world ever be truly civilized? We always assume so, but will it? Could any caveman be more blundering than this Judge Timberlane, who loses his one love to a fancy-footing shyster named Criley?

—If the world ever learns that it knows nothing yet about what keeps men and women loving each other, then will it have a chance for some brief happiness before the eternal frozen night sets in?

—You cannot heal the problems of any one marriage until you heal the problems of an entire civilization founded upon suspicion and superstition; and you cannot heal the problems of a civilization thus founded until it realizes its own barbarous nature, and realizes that what it thought was brave was only cruel, what it thought was holy was only meanness, and what it thought Success was merely the paper helmet of a clown more nimble than his fellows, scrambling for a peanut in the dust of an ignoble circus.

Thus brooding, remembering Jinny in airy dressing-gown scampering through the gloom of Bergheim, remembering such magnificent trivialities as their supping in the kitchen on scrambled eggs, sadly finding on the back of the coat-closet door the gay angels that Jinny had drawn in gold and scarlet, he was apprehensive under the black spell of the house.

Abruptly, late in May, he committed patricide and sold it.

He sold it to a Scandinavian Lutheran church organization for an “old folks’ home.” He hoped that the old folks might be quiet there and trustful, and outlive the belief that God was always a man in the dreary black of a Scandinavian preacher.

He went for the last look at Bergheim. Admitting that he was sentimental about it, he took Cleo along, for her final pilgrimage to that Viking paradise of desperate mice. But Cleo did not like it now. She kept close to Cass, upstairs and down and into the basement, where the Judge, who was a householder as well as a poet, wanted to see again one of the finest oil-furnaces his skilled eye had ever caressed.

They came out on the porch. While he was locking the door, the little cat frisked across the lawn.

Cass heard a barking, and swung round in agitation to see two dogs and some boys chasing Cleo over the grass. Before he could yell, the dogs had trapped Cleo between them. One of them seized her, its long teeth crushing her fragile ribs. It tossed her into the air, and then the other dog pounced.

Running frantically, almost choking the dog who held Cleo, Cass tore the mangled body from him, and held it to his chest.

The little cat half turned her head as if to try to look up at him; then blankness went over her small face, and she was dead. The tall man, like a Sioux chief, plodded to his car holding tight the bleeding body. He was deaf; he could not hear the small boys wailing apologies. As he walked, he was crying.

He drove home—to what had become home now, garish and unloved— with one hand on the wheel and the other holding the light body of the cat, dripping blood on him. Expressionless, he drove the car into the garage, took up a spade, hefted it, and buried the body, so tiny and unrecognizable, under a rosebush. He walked into the house and upstairs. He changed his clothes and brought the stained suit down to Mrs. Higbee.

“Will you have this dry-cleaned, please? It’s all over blood. Some dogs killed Cleo. Cleo is dead. Some dogs killed her. I buried her.”

“Oh, Judge, it seems like God is taking everything away from us!”

He did not listen. He was trapped in a thought that he knew to be superstitious, but he could not help linking Jinny to the dead Cleo. He could not resist. He tramped to the telephone and dictated a wire for Jinny, in Darien:

Dear Jin, letter from you overdue, am worried, wire if you are all right, love.

He did not expect an answer till the next day, but that evening he dared not stir from the house, and at a little after ten he was called by Western Union.

“This the Judge? Day-letter, signed Jinny, from Darien, Connecticut. Shall I read it to you? All ready? It’s fairly long:

“Goody this gives me chance annoy my nurse and Avis who might stop me but out of house for dinner. Got sick of having nurse nagging me take my insulin she worse than you ever were darling so laid off injections three days and on bat of candy in New York what a fool I was am back in bed doctor seems worried wish you were here to tuck me in things like this did not happen when with you but honestly would you think four cream puffs equal to one wagonload arsenic love love.”

Cass did not smile. He thought for not more than a minute. He called Judge Blackstaff:

“Steve, I’m truly sorry but I must leave for New York tonight, by car. Life and death. Will you phone George Hame for me and take over? Thanks.”

He called Alex Snowflower, Sheriff of the county:

“Sheriff? Cass Timberlane. I’ve got to be in Chicago, to catch a plane East, tomorrow morning. Can you do something illegal and get one of your deputies or somebody with enough gas to get me there?”

“You bet your life I will, Judge. I’ll drive you myself. You’ll get there.”

“Awfully grateful. We want to make sure we won’t get stopped, though. I’ve got to be there!”

“Well be there. I’d like to see any Wisconsin cop halt Judge Timberlane and the high sheriff of Radisson County! Expect me at eleven.”

Cass telephoned to Chicago, to a judge of consequence, who promised that by some means, preferably legal, he would have a seat for him on the morning airplane to New York.

All this time, Cass had been thinking about telephoning to Darien. He could hear himself, only too clearly, bullying the unpleasant butler, then demanding of Avis how Jinny was; hear himself saying with impressive briefness, “I’ll be there tomorrow, about noon”; hear Avis floundering, “I don’t know that it would be convenient to have you come just now.”

No. What he was really afraid of was that Avis would say that Jinny was dead. He did not telephone to Darien.

Mrs. Higbee was lurking in the kitchen. When he plunged in with “I’d like three or four sandwiches in a box, and some very hot coffee in the thermos,” she worried, “You look awful fierce and wild, Judge. You going to her?”

“Yes.”

She said nothing more.

Sheriff Snowflower came blasting up to the house ten minutes before his promised time. Cass went out to him quietly. They shook hands, saying nothing, and the Sheriff started off through the decorous city streets at fifty miles an hour, which he increased to an unswerving seventy as soon as they had come to the end of Chippewa Avenue—an empty gray shell by night. They crossed the Big Eagle River, soared to the top of the bluffs, and headed southeast, for St. Croix Falls, on the Old North Military Road.

Cass had the familiar illusion that the countryside, unreal with night, was running past them, trees charging at them, a hamlet of ten houses hastily erected while they were coming up and hurled at them, road curves swinging round to avoid them, while they sat secure in this small, dark control-room, motionless, the center of the world.

The more rapidly they drove, the more bulkily quiet was the Sheriff. They were formal with each other at first. Though they were neighbors in the court house, they knew each other only on county business. At the start, it was “I hear Mrs. Timberlane is kind of ill, Judge; we’ll get you to her, all right,” and “Thank you, Sheriff,” but they were both good farmers at heart and good Middlewesterners and first-name-users, and after a hundred and fifty miles it was “I’ll tell you, Cass; I know Jinny has got my Mildred skun forty ways for looks and brains, but me, I like a plain wife that’s a bearcat on kids and dumplings,” and “No, I’ll argue with you about that, Alex; you’ve also got to think of what a wife wants for HERSELF.”

Twice they stopped, and Cass was astonished to see an all-night lunch, materialized out of darkness and actually standing still, not rushing past them, astonished to learn how stiff he was, as he eased himself out of the car. Ten minutes later, the place was gone, lost back in the country that had been annihilated behind them, and he could not remember what he had eaten.

Always he strained his eyes ahead, imagining, even a hundred miles from Chicago, that he saw the city’s glow. Yet when rows of green-roofed suburban bungalows began to flow past, then factories and wooden tenements and street cars, he felt that he had been lifted up and instantly put down here.

He caught his plane, he slept all the way to New York, his taxicab hurried into the Grand Central Terminal, and just before one o’clock he was ringing the bell at Avis Elderman’s large yellow house in Darien.

The butler, small but swelling with superciliousness, opened the door and said “Yes?”

It occurred to Cass that the man did not recognize him, perhaps did not know that he existed; that he looked dusty and disarrayed; that no one in the house knew that he was coming. But it also occurred to him that a few feet away was his Jinny.

He said impatiently, “I’m Mr. Timberlane.”

“Yes?”

“Damn it, Judge Timberlane!”

Everyone on that floor must have heard. Avis popped into sight, down the hall, and the expression on her face indicated only that it was VERY inconvenient to have strangers coming in just before lunchtime.

He did not so much push the butler aside as blow him away with the explosiveness of his “Avis! Jinny?”

“Oh, yes, Cass. Well—no—she isn’t very well.”

“But what—”

“She is in a coma.”

“Does that mean—”

“Not always, our doctor says. Not with insulin. But it’s serious. He brought her out of one coma, but—well, she’s more in kind of a daze now than a real coma. She keeps coming to, and complaining— oh, not exactly complaining, perhaps, but—It’s very hard on the household, I MUST say, after all we’ve done!”

“I’m going up to her.”

“I don’t know that that would be—”

“You heard me! Where is she?”