You Can't Go Home Again (47 page)

“But the letters that drive the blade into my heart and twist it round are those which neither curse nor threaten—the letters written by stunned and stricken people who never did me any wrong, whose whole feeling towards me was one of kindly good will and belief, who did not know me
as I am
, and who write me now straight out of the suffering heart of man, with their spirits quivering, stripped, whipped by naked shame, to ask me over and over again in their bewilderment that terrible and insistent question: ‘Why did you do it? Why? Why? Why?’

“And as I read their letters I no longer know why. I can’t answer them. As Man-Creating, I thought I knew, and thought, too, that the answer was all-sufficient. I wrote about them with blunt directness, trying to put in every relevant detail and circumstance, and I did it because I thought it would be cowardly not to write that way, false to withhold or modify. I thought that the Thing Itself was its own and valid reason for being.

“But now that it is done, I am no longer sure of anything. I am troubled by the most maddening doubts and impossible regrets. I have moments when I feel that I would give my life if I could
un-write
my book,
un-print
its pages. For what has it accomplished, apparently, except to ruin my relatives, my friends, and everyone in town whose life was ever linked with mine? And what is there for me to salvage out of all this wreckage?

“‘The integrity of the artist,’ you may say.

“Ah, yes—if I could only soothe my conscience with that solacement! For what integrity is there that is not tainted with human frailty? If only I could tell myself that every word and phrase and incident in the book had been created at the top of my bent and with the impartial judgment of unrancorous detachment! But I know it is not true. So many words come back to me, so many whip-lash phrases, that must have been written in a spirit that had nothing to do with art or my integrity. We are such stuff as dust is made of, and where we fail—we fail! Is there, then, no such thing as a pure spirit in creation?

“In all the whole wretched experience there is also a grim and horrible humour. It is insanely comical to find in almost all these letters that I am being cursed for doing things I did not do and for saying things I did not say. It is even more ludicrous to hear myself grudgingly praised for having the one thing that I have not got. Few of these letters—even those which threaten hanging, and those which deny me the remotest scrap of talent (except a genius for obscenity)—fail to commend me for what their writers call ‘my memory’. Some of them accuse me of sneaking round as a little boy of eight with my pockets stuffed with notebooks, my ears fairly sprouting from my head and my eyes popping out, in my effort to spy upon and snatch up every word and act and phrase among my virtuous and unsuspecting fellow-townsmen.

“‘It’s the dirtiest book I ever read,’ one citizen cogently remarks, ‘but I’ll have to give you credit for one thing—you’ve got a wonderful memory.’

“And that is just exactly what I have
not
got. I have to see a thing a
thousand times
before I see it once. This thing they call my memory, this thing they think they can themselves remember, is nothing that they ever saw. It is rather something that
I
saw after looking at the thing a thousand times, and this is what they
think
they can remember.”

Randy paused in his reading of the letter, for he suddenly realised that what George said was literally true. In the weeks since the book was published, he himself had seen it proved over and over again.

He knew that there was scarcely a detail in George’s book that was precisely true to fact, that there was hardly a page in which everything had not been transmuted and transformed by the combining powers of George’s imagination; yet readers got from it such an instant sense of reality that many of them were willing to swear that the thing described had been not only “drawn from life”, but was the actual and recorded fact. And that was precisely what had made the outcry and denunciation so furious.

But not only that. It was funny enough to hear people talking and arguing with each other out of a savage conviction that scenes and incidents in the book were literally true because they may have had some basis in remembered fact. It was even more grotesque to hear them testify, as some of them now did, that they had been witnesses to events which he knew to be utter fabrications of the author’s imagination.

“Why,” they cried, when final proof of anything was wanted, “he’s got it all in! He’s written it all down, just the way it happened! Nothing’s changed a bit! Look at the Square!”

They always came back to the Square, for the Square had occupied a prominent place in
Home to Our Mountains
. George had pictured it with such intensity of vision that almost every brick and windowpane and cobblestone became imprinted on the reader’s mind. But what was this Square? Was it the town Square of Libya Hill? Everybody said it was. Hadn’t the local newspaper set it down in black and white that “our native chronicler has described the Square with a photographic eye”? Then people had read the book for themselves and had agreed.

So it was useless to argue with them—useless to point out to them how Webber’s Square differed from their own, unless to mention a hundred items of variation. They had been pitiful in their anger when t hey first discovered that art had imitated life; now they were ludicrous in their ignorance that life was also imitating art.

With a smile and a shake of the head, Randy turned back to the letter:

“In God’s name, what
have
I done?” George concluded. “Have I really acted according to some inner truth and real necessity, or did my unhappy mother conceive and give birth to a perverse monster who has defiled the dead and betrayed his family, kinsmen, neighbours, and the human race? What should I have done? What ought I to do now? If there is any help or answer in you, for Christ’s sake let me have it. I feel like a dead leaf in a hurricane. I don’t know where to turn. You alone can help me. Stay with me—write me—tell me what you think.

“Yours ever,

“GEORGE.”

George’s suffering had been so palpable in every sentence of his letter that Randy had winced in reading it. He had felt the naked anguish of his friend’s raw wound almost as if it had been his own. But he knew that neither he nor any other man could give the help answer that George sought. He would have to find it somehow in himself. That was the only way he had ever been able to learn anything.

So when Randy drafted his reply he deliberately made his letter as casual as he could. He did not want to let it seem that he attached too much importance to the town’s reaction. He said that he did not know what he would do if he were George, since he was not a writer, but that he had always supposed a writer had to write about the life he knew. To cheer George up, he added that the people of Libya Hill reminded him of children who had not yet been told the facts of life. They still believed, apparently, in the stork. Only people who knew nothing about the world’s literature could be surprised or shocked to learn where every good book came from.

And then, in a kind of mild parenthesis, he said that Tim Wagner, the town’s most celebrated souse, noted for his wit in his rare intervals of sobriety, had been a warm supporter of the book from the beginning, but had made one reservation: “Why, hell! If George wants to write about a horse-thief, that’s all right. Only the next time I hope he don’t give his street address. And there ain’t no use in throwing in his telephone number, too.”

Randy knew this would amuse George, and it did. In fact, George told him later that it was the most sound and valuable critical advice that he had ever had.

Randy ended his letter by assuring George that even if he was a writer, he still considered him a member of the human race. And he added, in what he hoped would be a comforting postscript, that there were other angry mutterings abroad. He had heard a rumour, whispered by one of the town’s leading business men with a great air of hush-hush and please-don’t-breathe-a-word-of-this-to-anyone, that Mr. Jarvis Riggs, the president of Libya Hill’s largest bank and past hero of infallibilities, was tottering on the brink of ruin.

“So you see,” Randy concluded, “if that godly gentleman is capable of imperfection, there may still be hope of pardon even in creatures as vile as you.”

25. The Catastrophe

A day or two after receiving Randy’s reply, George was reading the
New York Times
one morning when his eye was caught by a small news item on an inside page. It occupied only a scant two inches or so at the bottom of a column, but the Libya Hill date line leaped out at him:

BANK FAILS IN SOUTH

LIBYA HILL, 0. C., Mar. 12—The Citizens Trust Company of this city failed to open its doors for business this morning, and throughout the day, as news of its closing spread, conditions of near-panic mounted steadily here and in all the surrounding region. The bank was one of the largest in western Old Catawba and for years had been generally regarded as a model of conservative management and financial strength. The cause of its failure is not yet known. It is feared that the losses of the people of this community may be extensive.

The alarm occasioned by the closing of the bank was heightened later in the day by the discovery of the sudden and rather mysterious death of Mayor Baxter Kennedy. His body was found with a bullet through his head, and all the available evidence seems to point to suicide. Mayor Kennedy was a man of exceptionally genial and cheerful disposition, and is said to have had no enemies.

Whether there is any connection between the two events which have so profoundly disturbed the accustomed calm of this mountain district is not known, although their close coincidence has given rise to much excited conjecture.

“So,” thought George, laying down the paper with a stunned and thoughtful air, “it has come at last!...What was it that Judge Rumford Bland had said to them?”

The whole scene in the Pullman wash-room came back to him. He saw again the stark and speechless terror in the faces of Libya Hill’s leaders and rulers as the frail but terrible old blind man suddenly confronted them and held them with his sightless eyes and openly accused them of ruining the town. As George remembered this and sat there thinking about the news he had just read, he felt quite sure there must be some direct relation between the failure of the bank and the Mayor’s suicide.

• • • • *
        

There was, indeed. Things had been building up to this double climax for a long time.

Jarvis Riggs, the banker, had come from a poor but thoroughly respectable family in the town. When he was fifteen his father died and he had to quit school and go to work to support his mother. He held a succession of small jobs until, at eighteen, he was offered a modest but steady position in the Merchants National Bank.

He was a bright young fellow and a “hustler”, and step by step he worked his way up until he became a teller. Mark Joyner kept a deposit at the Merchants National and used to come home and talk about Jarvis Riggs. In those days he had none of the brittle manner and pompous assurance that were to characterise him later, after he had risen to greatness. His hair, which was afterwards to turn a dead and lifeless sandy colour, had glints of gold in it then, his cheeks were full and rosy, he had a bright and smiling face, and it was always briskly and cheerfully—“Good morning, Mr. Joyner!” or “Good morning, Mr. Shepperton!”—when a customer came in. He was friendly, helpful, courteous, eager to please, and withal businesslike and knowing. He also dressed neatly and was known to be supporting his mother. All these things made people like him and respect him. They wanted to see him succeed. For Jarvis Riggs was a living vindication of an American legend—that of the poor boy who profits from the hardships of his early life and “makes good”. People would nod knowingly to one another and say of him:

“That young man has his feet on the ground.”

“Yes,” they would say, “he’s
going
somewhere.”

So when, along about 1912, the word began to go round that a small group of conservative business men were talking of starting a new bank, and that Jarvis Riggs was going to be its cashier, the feeling was most favourable. The backers explained that they were not going to compete with the established banks. It was simply their feeling that a growing town like Libya Hill, with its steady increase in population and in its business interests, could use another bank. And the new bank, one gathered, was to be conducted according to the most eminently approved principles of sound finance. But it was to be a progressive bank, too, forward-looking bank, mindful of the future, the great, golden, magnificent future that Libya Hill was sure to have—that it was even heresy to doubt. In this way it was also to be a young man’s bank. And this was where Jarvis Riggs came in.

It is not too much to say that the greatest asset the new enterprise had from the beginning was Jarvis Riggs. He had played his cards well. He had offended no one, he had made no enemies, he had always remained modest, friendly, and yet impersonal, as if not wishing to intrude himself too much on the attention of men who stood for substance and authority in the town’s life. The general opinion was that he knew what he was doing. He had learned about life in the highly-thought-of “university of hard knocks”, he had learned business and banking in “the hard school of experience”, so everybody felt that if Jarvis Riggs was going to be cashier of the new bank, then the new bank was pretty sure to be all right.

Jarvis himself went around town and sold stock in the bank. He had no difficulty at all. He made it quite plain that he did not think anyone was going to make a fortune. He simply sold the stock as a safe and sound investment, and that was how everybody felt about it. The bank was modestly capitalised at $25,000, and there were 250 shares at $100 each. The sponsors, including Jarvis, took 100 shares between them, and the remaining 150 shares were divided among “a selected group of leading business men”. As Jarvis said, the bank was really “a community project whose first and only purpose is to serve the community”, so no one was allowed to acquire too large an interest.