A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      CASS TIMBERLANE (1945)
Author:     SINCLAIR LEWIS
eBook No.:  0200291.txt
Edition:    1
Language:   English
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Date first posted:          April 2002
Date most recently updated: April 2002

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CASS TIMBERLANE by SINCLAIR LEWIS

A NOVEL OF HUSBANDS AND WIVES



The scene of this story, the small city of Grand Republic in
Central Minnesota, is entirely imaginary, as are all the
characters.

But I know that the characters will be "identified," each of them
with several different real persons in each of the Minnesota cities
in which I have happily lingered: in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Winona,
St. Cloud, Mankato, Fergus Falls and particularly, since it is only
a little larger than "Grand Republic" and since I live there, in
the radiant, sea-fronting, hillside city of Duluth.

All such guesses will be wrong, but they will be so convincing that
even the writer will be astonished to learn how exactly he has
drawn some judge or doctor or banker or housewife of whom he has
never heard, or regretful to discover how poisonously he is
supposed to have described people of whom he is particularly fond.

SINCLAIR LEWIS




1


Until Jinny Marshland was called to the stand, the Judge was
deplorably sleepy.

The case of Miss Tilda Hatter vs. the City of Grand Republic had
been yawning its way through testimony about a not very interesting
sidewalk.  Plaintiff's attorney desired to show that the city had
been remarkably negligent in leaving upon that sidewalk a certain
lump of ice which, on February 7, 1941, at or about the hour of
9:37 P.M., had caused the plaintiff to slip, to slide, and to be
prone upon the public way, in a state of ignominy and sore pain.
There had been an extravagant amount of data as to whether the lump
of ice had been lurking sixteen, eighteen, or more than eighteen
feet from the Clipper Hardware Store.  And all that May afternoon
the windows had been closed, to keep out street noises, and the
court room had smelled, as it looked, like a schoolroom.

Timberlane, J., was in an agony of drowsiness.  He was faithful
enough, and he did not miss a word, but he heard it all as in sleep
one hears malignant snoring.

He was a young judge: the Honorable Cass Timberlane, of the Twenty-
Second Judicial District, State of Minnesota.  He was forty-one,
and in his first year on the bench, after a term in Congress.  He
was a serious judge, a man of learning, a believer in the majesty
of the law, and he looked like a tall Red Indian.  But he was
wishing that he were out bass-fishing, or at home, reading Walden
or asleep on a cool leather couch.

Preferably asleep.

All the spectators in the room, all five of them, were yawning and
chewing gum.  The learned counsel for the plaintiff, Mr. Hervey
Plint, the dullest lawyer in Grand Republic, a middle-aged man with
a miscellaneous sort of face, was questioning Miss Hatter.  He was
a word-dragger, an uh'er, a looker to the ceiling for new thoughts.

"Uh--Miss Hatter, now will you tell us what was the--uh--the
purpose of your going out, that evening--I mean, I mean how did you
happen to be out on an evening which--I think all the previous
testimony agrees that it was, well, I mean, uh, you might call it
an inclement evening, but not such as would have prevented the, uh,
the adequate cleaning of the thoroughfares--"

"Jekshn leading quest," said the city attorney.

"Jekshn stained," said the Court.

"I will rephrase my question," confided Mr. Plint.  He was a
willing rephraser, but the phrases always became duller and duller
and duller.

Sitting above them on the bench like Chief Iron Cloud, a lean
figure of power, the young father of his people, Judge Timberlane
started to repeat the list of presidents, a charm which usually
would keep him awake.  He got through it fairly well, stumbling
only on Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore, as was reasonable,
but he remained as sleepy as ever.

Without missing any of Miss Hatter's more spectacular statements,
His Honor plunged into the Counties of Minnesota, all eighty-seven
of them, with their several county-seats:


Aitkin--Aitkin
Anoka--Anoka
Becker--Detroit Lakes
Beltrami--Bemidji


He had reached "Olmsted--Rochester" when he perceived that Miss
Hatter had gone back to her natural mummy-case, and the clerk was
swearing in a witness who pricked His Honor into wakefulness.

--How did I ever miss seeing her, in a city as small as this?
Certainly not four girls in town that are as pretty, he reflected.

The new witness was a half-tamed hawk of a girl, twenty-three or
-four, not tall, smiling, lively of eye.  The light edged gently
the clarity of her cheeks, but there was something daring in her
delicate Roman nose, her fierce black hair.  Her gray suit
indicated prosperity, which in Grand Republic was respectability.

--Be an exciting kid to know, thought Timberlane, J., that purist
and precisionist and esteemed hunter of ducks, that chess-player
and Latinist, who was a man unmarried--at least, unmarried since
his recent and regrettable divorce.

The young woman alighted on the oak witness-chair like a swallow on
a tombstone.

Counselor Plint said gloomily, "Will you please just give us your,
uh, your name and profession and address, please?"

"Jinny Marshland--Virginia Marshland.  I'm draftsman and designer
for the Fliegend Fancy Box and Pasteboard Toy Manufacturing
Company, and a kind of messenger--man of all work."

"Residence, please."

"I live up in Pioneer Falls, mostly.  I was born there, and I
taught school there for a while.  But you mean here in Grand
Republic?  I live with Miss Hatter, at 179 1/2 West Flandrau
Street."

Profoundly, as one who doubts the eternal course of the planets,
Mr. Plint worried, "You board with Miss Hatter?"

"Yes, sir."

Jinny and Judge Cass Timberlane looked at each other.  He had been
approving her voice.  He loved his native city of Grand Republic,
and esteemed the housewifery and true loyal hearts of its 43,000
daughters, but it disturbed him that so many of them had voices
like the sound of a file being drawn across the edge of a sheet of
brass.  But Miss Marshland's voice was light and flexible and
round.

--I WOULD fall for a girl merely because she has fine ankles and a
clear voice, I who have maintained that the most wretched error in
all romances is this invariable belief that because a girl has a
good nose and a smooth skin, therefore she will be agreeable to
live with and--well, make love to.  The insanity that causes even
superior men (meaning judges) to run passionately after magpies
with sterile hearts.  This, after the revelations of female
deception I've seen in divorce proceedings.  I am corrupted by
sentimentality.

Mr. Plint was fretting his bone.  "Now, uh, Miss--Miss Marshland.
Oh, yes, precisely.  Now as I was saying, Miss Marshland, several
people have testified that there was a party--anyway, there were
several guests at the Hatter residence that evening, and there was
more or less eating and drinking, and what we want to know is, was
there any sign--uh--I mean any sign of intoxicating beverages being
consumed, I mean, particularly by Miss Hatter herself?"

"No, she drank a coke.  I might take a cocktail sometimes, but I'm
sure Miss Hatter never touches a drop."

Charles Sayward, the city attorney, was roused from slumber to
protest, "I move the testimony be stricken, as hearsay and
irrelevant."

Judge Timberlane said gravely, "I must grant that motion, Mr.
Sayward, but don't you think you're being a little technical?"

"It is my humble understanding of court procedure, Your Honor, that
it is entirely technical."

(On the Heather Club golf course they called each other "Charles"
and "Cass.")

"On the other hand, Mr. City Attorney, you know that here in the
Middlewest we pride ourselves on being less formal than the stately
tribunals of Great Britain and our traditional East.  I may be so
bold as to say that even in court, we're almost human, and that on
a day like this--you may not have noticed it, Mr. City Attorney,
but it is somewhat somnolent--then we frequently permit any
testimony that will give this jury--"  He smiled at the honest but
bored citizens, "an actual picture of the issue.  However," and now
he smiled at Jinny, "I think you'd better confine yourself to
answering the questions, without comment, Miss Marshland.  Motion
granted.  Continue, Mr. Plint."

As Jinny went on, without noticeably obeying the Court's command,
Cass felt that the court-room air was fresher, that there might
actually be some life and purpose to court proceedings.  She was
perhaps twenty-four to his forty-one, but he insisted that Jinny
and he were young together, and in antagonism to the doddering Mr.
Plint, the cobwebbed and molding Charles Sayward (who was thirty-
five, by the records) and the Assyrian antiquity of the jury.

He wanted to lean over the sharp oak edge of his lofty desk and
demand of Jinny, "See here.  You know the jury will give the Hatter
woman approximately half of whatever she's suing for, no matter
what nonsense we grind out.  Let's go off and forget all this.  I
want to talk to you, and make it clear that I can be light-minded
and companionable."

But it came to him that this would not be the way to impress Jinny.
She thought that he was a judge and a venerable figure; she
probably thought that he was more columnar than her young suitors
with their dancing and babble.  He straightened, he placed his
right forefinger senatorially against his cheek, he cleared his
throat, and for her, glancing down to see if he was successfully
fooling her, he pretended that he was a judge on a bench.

She was explaining, to Mr. Plint's prompting, that she boarded at
Miss Hatter's, along with Tracy Oleson (secretary to that
industrial titan, Mr. Wargate), Lyra Coggs the librarian, Eino
Roskinen, and three other young people.  They were artistic and
pretty refined.  No indeed, they never got drunk, and if Tilda
Hatter slipped on any ole lump of ice, that lump of ice was meant
to be slipped on.  Yes, she liked working for the Fliegend Company.
She wasn't, she beamed, much of a draftsman, but Mr. and Mrs.
Fliegend were so kind.  She liked it better than schoolteaching;
you had to be so solemn in school.

She was not loquacious so much as gay and natural.  It was all
fantastically irregular, but City Attorney Sayward had given up
trying to check her, and he looked up at Judge Timberlane with
humorous helplessness.  The jury yearned over her as though they
were her collective parent, and Counselor Plint had a notion,
though he didn't know how in the world it had come about, that she
was a useful witness.

Only George Hame, the court reporter, was unmoved, as he made his
swift symbols in a pulpy-looking notebook.  To George, all accents
and all moods, the shrieks of the widows of murdered bootleggers,
the droning of certified accountants explaining crooked ledgers,
the grumble of Finnish or Polish homesteaders, were the same.  What
was said never seemed the important thing to George, but whether he
got it all down.  The judge, his captain, could be unprofessionally
enlivened by an unnecessary girl witness, after only five months on
the bench, but George did not believe in women.  He had a wife
unremittingly productive of babies, for whose assembly-belt
production he felt only accidentally responsible, and after sixteen
years of court reporting, all witnesses, pretty or otherwise, were
to him merely lumps of potato in a legal hash that was nourishing
but tedious.

Jinny Marshland finished her testimony, smiled at Cass, smiled at
Tilda Hatter, and slipped out of the court room like a trout
flicking down a stream.  The case reverted to mumbling, and the
Judge reverted to the list of Minnesota counties and to a
sleepiness which made his shoulders ache, his eyes feel dusty and
swollen.  With his right hand, the large hand of a woodsman or a
hunter, he gravely stroked the lapel of his dark-gray jacket,
smoothed his painfully refined dark-blue tie, as he repeated:


Otter Tail County--Fergus Falls
Pennington--Thief River Falls
Pine--Pine City
Pipestone--Pipestone


Till half an hour ago he had been proud of the court room; of his
high oak desk, jutting into the room like a prow, with a silken
American flag, topped with a small gold eagle, erected beside the
Judge's leather chair.  He had been proud of the carved seal of
Minnesota on the oak paneling behind the bench; of the restful
dark-gray plaster walls; of the resplendently shiny oak benches,
though they were hard upon the restless anatomy of the aching
public.  He had felt secure and busy, for this was his workshop,
his studio, his laboratory, in which he was an artist-scientist,
contributing to human progress and honor.

Now it was a stuffy coop, absurdly small for a court room, barely
able to hold eighty people when crowded.  Such portions of the
Eternal Law as were represented by the Statutes of the State of
Minnesota seemed dreary today, and he wanted to be out in the May
breeze, walking with Jinny Marshland.

Cass was considered a conscientious judge, but he adjourned today
at five minutes before the usual four o'clock.  He could eat no
more bran.

Before he could hasten out into the open air, however, he still had
half an hour of chamber work.  He was rather proud of Chambers No.
3, Radisson County Court House.  On his election, when he had taken
the room over, it already looked scholarly and solid, with a cliff
of law-books, a long oak table, a council of black leather chairs,
and he had added the framed photographs of Justices Holmes,
Cardozo, and Brandeis . . . and of the historic bag of ducks that
Dr. Roy Drover and he had shot in 1939.  On his portly desk was a
handsome bronze inkwell which he never used, and a stupendous
bronze automatic cigar-lighter--a gift--which he had always
disliked.

He had to sign an injunction, to talk with a Swede who desired to
be naturalized.  Young Vincent Osprey, who overlaid with a high
Yale Law School gloss a dullness almost equal to that of Mr. Hervey
Plint, brought in a woman client, on the theory that she wanted
wholesome advice about her coming divorce suit.  She did not want
advice; she wanted to get rid of her present spouse so that she
could marry another with a more powerful kiss.  But in most
judicial districts of Minnesota, domestic-relations procedure is as
fatherly and informal as a physician's consultation, and Cass held
forth to her.

"Mrs. Nelson, a woman or a man has only four or five real
friendships in his whole life.  To lose one of them is to lose a
chance to give and to trust.  Am I being too discursive?"

"I t'ink so."

"Well look, Mrs. Carlson--"

"Mrs. Nelson."

"--Nelson.  Look.  In a divorce, the children are terrified.  Have
you any children?"

"Not by Nelson."

Judge Timberlane glanced at Mr. Osprey and shook his head.  The
lawyer yelped, "All right, Mrs. Nelson, you skip along now.  That's
all His Honor has to say."

When they were alone, Cass turned to Osprey, and it was to be seen
that Osprey was his admirer.

"No use, Vince.  Let it go through.  I figure she's hot to gallop
to another marriage-bed.  Otherwise I'd give her a red-hot lecture
on the humiliations of divorce.  I will facilitate any divorce, in
case of cruelty--or extreme boredom, which is worse--but, Vince,
divorce is hell.  Don't you ever divorce Cerise, no matter how
extravagant you say she is."

"You bet your life I wouldn't, Chief.  I'm crazy about that girl."

"You're lucky.  If it weren't for my work, my life would be as
empty as a traitor's after a war.  Ever since Blanche divorced me--
why, Vince, I have nobody to show my little tin triumphs to.  I
envy Cerise and you.  And I don't seem to find any girl that will
take Blanche's place."

As he spoke, Cass was reflecting that, after all, Jinny Marshland
was just another migratory young woman.

"But what about Christabel Grau, Chief?  I thought you and she were
half engaged," bubbled Vincent Osprey.

"Oh, Chris is a very kind girl.  I guess that's the trouble.  I
apparently want somebody who's so intelligent that she'll think I'm
stupid, so independent that she'll never need me, so gay and daring
that she'll think I'm slow.  That's my pattern, Vince; that's my
fate."



2


The city of Grand Republic, Radisson County, Minnesota, eighty
miles north of Minneapolis, seventy-odd miles from Duluth, has
85,000 population.

It is large enough to have a Renoir, a school-system scandal,
several millionaires, and a slum.  It lies in the confluent valleys
where the Big Eagle River empties into the Sorshay River, which
flows west to the Mississippi.

Grand Republic grew rich two generations ago through the uncouth
robbery of forests, iron mines, and soil for wheat.  With these
almost exhausted, it rests in leafy quiet, wondering whether to
become a ghost town or a living city.  The Chamber of Commerce says
that it has already become a city, but, in secret places where the
two bankers on the school board cannot hear them, the better
schoolteachers deny this.

At least there is in Grand Republic a remarkable number of private
motor cars.  It was a principal cause of his reputation for
eccentricity that Cass Timberlane, on amiable spring days, walked
the entire mile and a quarter from the court house to his home.

He climbed up Joseph Renshaw Brown Way to Ottawa Heights, on which
were the Renoir and the millionaires and most of the houses
provided with Architecture.

He looked down on the Radisson County Court House, in which was his
own court room, and he did not shudder.  He was fondly accustomed
to its romanticism and blurry inconvenience.

It had been built in 1885 from the designs of an architect who was
drunk upon Howard Pyle's illustrations to fairy tales.  It was of a
rich red raspberry brick trimmed with limestone, and it displayed a
round tower, an octagonal tower, a minaret, a massive entrance with
a portcullis, two lofty flying balconies of iron, colored-glass
windows with tablets or stone petals in the niches above them, a
green and yellow mosaic roof with scarlet edging, and the
breathless ornamental stairway from the street up to the main
entrance without which no American public building would be
altogether legal.

Cass knew that it was as archaic as armor and even less comfortable,
yet he loved it as a symbol of the ancient and imperial law.  It
was his Westminster, his Sorbonne; it was the one place in which he
was not merely a male in vulgar trousers, but a spiritual force
such as might, with a great deal of luck and several hundreds of
years, help to make of Grand Republic another Edinburgh.

He had, too, an ancestral proprietary right in this legal palace,
for his father had started off his furniture business (wholesale as
well as retail, and therefore noble) by providing most of the
chairs and desks for the court house.

When he had reached Varennes Boulevard, circling along the cliffs
on top of Ottawa Heights, Cass could see the whole city, the whole
valley, with the level oat and barley fields on the uplands beyond.
The Big Eagle River came in from the south, bearing the hot
murmurous air from the great cornfields, from the country of the
vanquished Sioux; the Sorshay River, which had been called the
Sorcier by the coureurs de bois, two hundred years ago, wound from
a northern darkness of swamp and lakes and impenetrable jackpine
thickets, the country of the tawny Chippewas.

At the junction of the rivers was the modern city, steel and cement
and gasoline and electricity, as contemporary as Chicago if but
one-fortieth the size and devoid of the rich raucousness of the
Loop.  The limestone magnificence of the Wargate Memorial
Auditorium and the titanic Blue Ox National Bank Building (no less
than twelve stories), the carved and educated granite of the
Alexander Hamilton High School, the Pantheon of the Duluth & Twin
Cities Railroad Station, the furnaces and prodigious brick sheds of
the Wargate Wood Products Corporation plant and a setting of
smaller factories, were all proofs of the Chamber of Commerce's
assertion that in a short time, perhaps twenty years or twenty
centuries, Grand Republic would have a million inhabitants.

But beyond the tracks, along the once navigable Sorshay River, the
wooden warehouses and shaky tenements were so like the frontier
village of seventy-five years ago that you imagined the wooden
sidewalks of the 1860's and the streets a churning of mud, with
Chippewa squaws and Nova Scotia lumbermen in crimson jackets and
weekly murder with axe handles.  Very untidy.

Indeed Mrs. Kenny Wargate, Manhattan-born and cynical daughter-in-
law of the Ruling Family, asserted that Grand Republic had leaped
from clumsy youth to senility without ever having a dignified
manhood.  She jeered, "Your Grand Republic slogan is: tar-paper
shanty to vacant parking lot in three generations."

But Judge Timberlane and his friends, loving the place as home,
believed that just now, after woes and failures and haste and waste
and experiment, Grand Republic was beginning to build up a kind of
city new to the world, a city for all the people, a city for
decency and neighborliness, not for ecclesiastical display and
monarchial power and the chatter of tamed journalists and
professors drinking coffee and eating newspapers in cafes.  And if
so many of the pioneers had been exploiters and slashers of the
forest, the Wargates had been and now were builders of industries
that meant homes and food for hundreds of immigrant families from
the fiords, from New England hills.

Cass often pondered thus as he walked along Varennes Boulevard.  As
he rounded a curve of the bluff-top, he could look northward, and
there, at the city's edge, was the true Northland, in the stretches
of pine and birch and poplar that framed the grim eye of Dead Squaw
Lake.  And he loved it as he could never love the lax and steamy
and foolishly laughing isles he had once seen in the Caribbean.



Through all of his meditation ran his startled remembrance of Jinny
Marshland on the witness stand.  He was still indignant that in a
city so small as Grand Republic he had never seen her.

But he knew that, for all his talk at public dinners about
Midwestern Democracy, the division between the proprietors and the
serfs was as violent in Grand Republic as in London.  The
truckdriver might call Boone Havock, the contractor, "Boone," when
they met in the Eitelfritz Brauhaus (as with remarkable frequency
they did meet), but he would never enter Boone's house or his
church, and as for Boone's asylum, the Federal Club, neither the
truckdriver nor any Scandinavian or Finn with less than $10,000
income nor any recognizable Jew whatever would be allowed even to
gawk through the leaded-glass windows (imported).

Even Lucius Fliegend, Jinny's Jewish employer, that fine and
sensitive old man, could not belong to the Federal Club, but had to
play his noontime chess in the Athletic Club.  And as a professing
member of Democracy, Cass was ashamed that not since he had been
elected judge had he once been in the Athletic Club.

He would remedy that right away.  Tomorrow.

He was abnormally conscious of the universal and multiple
revolution just then, in the early 1940's, from sulfa drugs and
surrealism and semantics to Hitler, but he was irritated by all the
Voices, by the radio prophets and the newspaper-column philosophers.
He had had two competent years in Washington as a Member of
Congress.  Sick of the arguments, he had refused to be re-elected,
yet now that he was back in his native town, sometimes he missed
the massacres in the Coliseum, and felt a little bored and futile.

And ever since his divorce from the costly and clattering Blanche,
he had been lonely.  Could a Jinny Marshland cure his loneliness,
his confusions in the skyrocketing world?

Then he rebuked himself.

Why should a charming girl, probably a dancer to phonographs, have
any desire to cure the lonelinesses of forty-year-old single
gentlemen?  There was tenderness and loyalty in Jinny, he felt, but
what would she want with a judge whom she would find out not to be
a judge at all but another gaunt and early-middle-aged man who
played the flute?  Thus he raged and longed as he neared his house.
It is understood that the newer psychiatrists, like the older
poets, believe that patients do fall in love at first sight.



Cass's house was sometimes known as "Bergheim" and sometimes as
"the old Eisenherz place."  It had been built as a summer
residence--in those days it had seemed to be quite out in the
country--by Simon Eisenherz, greatest of the Radisson County
pioneers, in 1888, and purchased by Cass's father, Owen Timberlane,
in 1929.  Owen had died there, less than a year later, leaving it
jointly to his wife, Marah, and to Cass, along with a local fortune
of forty or fifty thousand dollars.

The house was somber and somehow tragic, and when Cass's mother
died there, also, and he took Blanche, his wife, to it, she had
hated it as much as he himself loved it.  As a boy he had
considered it the wonderful castle, the haunt of power and beauty,
which no ordinary mortal like a Timberlane could ever hope to own
complete.  He still felt so.

George Hame, his court reporter, said that Bergheim was a wooden
model of the court house, and it did have a circular tower and an
octagonal conservatory, now called the "sun room."  It was painted
a dark green, merely because it had always been painted dark green.
Over the porches there were whole gardens of jig-saw blossoms, and
two of the windows were circular, and one triangular, with ruby
glass.  Cass admitted everything derisive that was said about this
monstrosity, and went on loving it, and explaining that if you
opened all of the windows all of the time, it wasn't airless
inside--not very--not on a breezy day.

As he came up the black-and-white marble walk to the bulbous
carriage-porch, a black kitten, an entire stranger, was sitting on
a step.  It said "meow," not whiningly but in a friendly mood, as
between equals, and it looked at Cass in a way that dared him to
invite it in for a drink.

He was a lover of cats, and he had had none since the ancient and
misanthropic Stephen had died, six months before.  He had a lively
desire to own this little black clown, all black, midnight black,
except for its sooty yellow eyes.  It would play on the faded
carpets when he came home from the court room to the still
loneliness that, in the old house, was getting on his nerves.

"Well, how are you, my friend?" he said.

The kitten said she was all right.  And about some cream now--?

"Kitten, I can't steal you from some child who's out looking for
you.  It wouldn't be right to invite you in."

The kitten did not answer anything so naive and prudish.  It merely
said, with its liquid and trusting glance, that Cass was its god,
beyond all gods.  It frisked, and dabbled at a fly with its tiny
black paw, and looked up at him to ask, "How's that?"

"You are a natural suborner of perjury and extremely sweet,"
admitted Cass, as he scooped it up and took it through the huge oak
door, down the dim hallway to the spacious kitchen and to Mrs.
Higbee, his cook-general.

Mrs. Higbee was sixty years old, and what is known as "colored,"
which meant that she was not quite so dark of visage as Webb
Wargate after his annual Florida tanning.  She was graceful and
sensible and full of love and loyalty.  She was in no way a comic
servant; she was like any other wholesome Middle-Class American,
with an accent like that of any other emigree from Ohio.  It must
be said that Mrs. Higbee was not singularly intelligent; only
slightly more intelligent than Mrs. Boone Havock or Mrs. Webb
Wargate; not more than twice as intelligent as Mrs. Vincent Osprey.
She was an Episcopalian, and continued to be one, for historic
reasons, though she was not greatly welcomed in the more
fashionable temples of that faith.  Judge Timberlane depended on
her good sense rather more than he did on that of George Hame or
his friend Christabel Grau.

Mrs. Higbee took the black kitten, tickled it under the chin, and
remarked.  "Our cat?"

"I'm afraid so.  I've stolen it."

"Well, I understand a black cat is either very good luck or very
bad luck, I forget which, so we can take a chance on it.  What's
its name?"

"What is it?  A her?"

"Let's see.  Um, I think so."

"How about 'Cleo'?  You know--from Cleopatra.  The Egyptians
worshiped cats, and Cleopatra was supposed to be thin and dark and
uncanny, like our kitten."

But he was not thinking of Queen Cleopatra.  He was thinking of
Jinny Marshland, and the thought was uneasy with him.

"All right, Judge.  You, Cleo, I'm going to get those fleas off you
right away tomorrow, and no use your kicking."

Cass marveled, "Has she got fleas?"

"Has--she--got--fleas!  Judge, don't you ever take a real good look
at females?"

"Not often.  Oh, Mrs. Higbee, you know I'm dining out tonight--at
Dr. Drover's."

"Yes.  You'll get guinea hen.  And that caramel ice cream.  And
Miss Grau.  You won't be home early."

"Anything else I ought to know about the party?"

"Not a thing. . . .  Will you look at that Cleo!  She knows where
the refrigerator is, already!"



In Cass's set, which was largely above the $7000 line, it was as
obligatory to dress for party dinners as in London, and anyway, he
rather liked his solid tallness in black and white.  He dawdled in
his bedroom, not too moonily thinking of Jinny yet conscious of
her.  A bright girl like that would do things with this room which,
he admitted, habit and indifference and too much inheritance of
furniture had turned into a funeral vault.  It was a long room with
meager windows and a fireplace bricked-up years ago.

The wide bed was of ponderous black walnut, carved with cherubs
that looked like grapes and grapes that looked like cherubs, and on
it was a spread of yellowed linen.  The dresser was of black walnut
also, with a mortuary marble slab; the wardrobe was like three
mummy-cases on end, though not so gay; and littered over everything
were books on law and economics and Minnesota history.

"It is a gloomy room.  No wonder Blanche insisted on sleeping in
the pink room."

He heard a friendly, entirely conversational "Meow?" and saw that
the gallant Cleo had come upstairs to explore.  All cats have to
know about every corner of any house they choose to honor, but
sometimes they are timid about caves under furniture.  There have,
indeed, been complaining and tiresome cats.  But Cleo talked to him
approvingly about her new home.

For so young and feminine a feline, she was a complete Henry M.
Stanley.  She looked at the old bedspread and patted its fringe.
She circulated around under the old Chinese teakwood chair, in
which no one had ever sat and which no one even partly sane would
ever have bought.  She glanced into the wardrobe, and cuffed a
shoelace which tried to trip her.

She said, "All right--fine" to Cass, and went on to the other
rooms.

In that stilly house he continued to hear her jaunty cat-slang till
she had gone into the gray room, the last and largest of the six
master's-bedrooms.  Then he jumped, at a long and terrified moan.
He hurried across the hall.  Cleo was crouched, staring at the bed
upon which had died his mother, that silent and bitter woman
christened Marah Nord.

The tiny animal shivered and whimpered till he compassionately
snatched it up and cuddled it at his neck.  It shivered once more
and, as he took it back to his own den, it began timidly to purr,
in a language older than the Egyptian.

"Too many ghosts in this house, Cleo.  You must drive them out--you
and SHE.  I have lived too long among shadows."



3


Bound for Dr. Drover's and the presumable delights of dinner, he
walked down Varennes Boulevard, past the houses of the very great:
the red-roofed Touraine chateau of Webb Wargate, the white-pillared
brick Georgian mansion (with a terrace, and box-trees in wine jars)
of the fabulous contractor, Boone Havock, and the dark granite
donjon and the bright white Colonial cottage (oversize) in which
dwelt and mutually hated each other the rival bankers Norton Trock
and John William Prutt.

On his judge's salary, without the inheritance from his father,
Cass could never have lived in this quarter.  It was the Best
Section; it was Mayfair, where only Episcopalians, Presbyterians,
Congregationalists, and the more Gothic Methodists--all Republicans
and all golf-players--lived on a golden isle amid the leaden surges
of democracy.

He turned left on Schoolcraft Way, into a neighborhood not so
seraphic yet still soundly apostolic and Republican, and came to
the square yellow-brick residence of his friend, Dr. Roy Drover.
Roy said, and quite often, that his place might not be so fancy as
some he knew, but it was the only completely air-conditioned house
in town, and it had, in the Etruscan catacombs of its basement, the
most powerful oil furnace and the best game-room, or rumpus room--
with a red-and-silver bar, a billiard table, a dance-floor, and a
rifle-range--in all of Grand Republic, which is to say in all of
the Western Hemisphere.

With the possible exception of Bradd Criley the lawyer, Dr. Drover
was Cass's closest friend.

Roy was two years older than Cass, who was two years older than
Bradd, and it is true that in boyhood, four years make a
generation, yet from babyhood to college days, Cass and Roy and
Bradd had formed an inseparable and insolently exclusive gang, to
the terror of all small animals within hiking distance of Grand
Republic.  They did such pleasurable killing together; killing
frogs, killing innocent and terrified snakes, killing gophers, and
later, when they reached the maturity of shot guns, killing ducks
and snipe and rabbits.  Like Indians they had roamed this old
Chippewa Indian land, familiars of swamp and crick (not creek),
cousins to the mink and mushrat (not muskrat), heroes of swimming
hole and ice-skating and of bobsledding down the long, dangerous
Ottawa Heights.  And once, finding a midden filled with stone
slivers, they had been very near to their closest kin, the unknown
Indians of ten thousand years ago, who came here for stone weapons
when the last glacier was retreating.

Growing older, they had shown variations of civilization and
maturity.  Bradd Criley had become a fancy fellow, wavy-haired and
slick about his neckties, a dancing man and a seducer of girls,
adding industry to his natural talents for the destruction of
women.  Cass Timberlane had gone bookish and somewhat moral.  Only
Roy Drover, graduating from medical school and becoming a neat
surgeon, a shrewd diagnostician, a skillful investor of money and,
before forty, a rich man, had remained entirely unchanged, a savage
and a small boy.

He preferred surgery, but in a city as small as Grand Republic, he
could not specialize entirely, and he kept up his practice as a
physician.

At forty-three, Dr. Drover looked fifty.  He was a large man, tall
as Cass Timberlane and much thicker, with a frontier mustache, a
long black 1870-cavalryman mustache, a tremendous evangelical
voice, and a wide but wrinkled face.

In a way, he was not a doctor at all.  He cared nothing for people
except as he could impress them with his large house, his log
fishing-lodge, named "Roy's Rest," in the Arrowhead Lake Region,
and his piratical airplane trips to Florida, where he noisily
played roulette and, taking no particular pains to conceal it from
his wife, made love to manicure girls posing as movie actresses and
completely fooling the contemptuously shrewd Dr. Drover.

When Roy was drunk--that did not happen often, and never on a night
before he was to operate--he got into fights with doormen and taxi-
drivers, and always won them, and always got forgiven by the
attendant policeman, who recognized him as one of their own hearty
sort, as a medical policeman.

He played poker, very often and rather late, and he usually won.
He read nothing except the Journal of the American Medical
Association, the newspapers, and his ledger.  Because he liked to
have humble customers call him "Doc," he believed that he was a
great democrat, but he hated all Jews, Poles, Finns, and people
from the Balkans, and he always referred to Negroes as "darkies" or
"smokes."

He said loudly, "Speaking as a doctor, I must tell you that it is a
scientifically proven fact that all darkies, without exception, are
mentally just children, and when you hear of a smart one, he's just
quoting from some renegade white man.  Down South, at Orlando, I
got to talking to some black caddies, and they said, 'Yessir, Mr.
White Man, you're dead right.  We don't want to go No'th.  Up
there, they put you to work!'  All the darkies are lazy and dumb,
but that's all right with me.  They'll never have a better friend
than I am, and they all know it, because they can see I understand
'em!"

Roy's most disgusted surprise had been in meeting a New York
internist who told him that in that Sidon there was an orchestra
made up of doctors, who put their spare time in on Mozart instead
of duck-hunting.

From land investments, which he made in co-operation with Norton
Trock, Roy had enough capital to make sure that his two sons would
not have to be driven and martyred doctors, like him, but could
become gentlemanly brokers.

Roy and his pallid wife, Lillian, were considered, in Grand
Republic, prime examples of the Happy Couple.

She hated him, and dreaded his hearty but brief embraces, and
prayed that he would not turn the two boys, William Mayo Drover and
John Erdmann Drover, into his sort of people, Sound, Sensible,
Successful Citizens with No Nonsense about Them.



Cass Timberlane knew, in moments of mystic enlightenment, that
whether or not Roy Drover was his best friend, there was no
question but that Roy was his most active enemy.

He had for years mocked Cass's constant reading, his legal
scruples, his failure to make slick investments, and his shocking
habit of listening to Farmer-Laborites.  After Cass had become a
judge, Roy grumbled, "I certainly wish I could make my money as
easy as that guy does--sitting up there on his behind and letting
the other fellows do the work."  Tonight, Cass sighed that Roy
would certainly ridicule Jinny Marshland, if he ever met that young
woman.

But Roy had been his intimate since before he could remember.
There had never been any special reason for breaking with him and,
like son with father, like ex-pupil with ex-teacher, Cass had an
uneasy awe of his senior and a longing--entirely futile--to make an
impression on him.  Cass's pride in being elected to Congress and
the bench was less than in being a better duck-shot than Roy.



There were present, for dinner and two tables of bridge, the
Drovers, Cass, Christabel Grau, the Boone Havocks, and the Don
Pennlosses.

Chris Grau was the orphaned daughter of a wagon-manufacturer.  She
was much younger than the others, and she was invited as an extra-
woman partner for Cass.  She was a plump and rather sweet spinster
of thirty-two who, until the recent taking off, had suffered from
too much affectionate mother.  She not only believed that in the
natural course of events Cass would fall in love with her and marry
her, but also that there is any natural course of events.  Rose
Pennloss, wife of the rather dull and quite pleasant Donald, the
grain-dealer, was Cass's sister, but Cass and she liked each other
and let each other alone.

It was Boone Havock and his immense and parrot-squawking wife
Queenie who were the great people, the belted earl and terraced
countess, of the occasion; they were somewhat more energetic and
vastly more wealthy than Dr. Drover, and it was said that Boone was
one of the sixteen most important men in Minnesota.

He had started as a lumberjack and saloon-bouncer and miner and
prizefighter--indeed, he had never left off, and his success in
railroad-contracting, bridge-building, and factory-construction was
due less to his knowledge of how to handle steel than to his
knowledge of how to battle with steel-workers.  But he owned much
of the stock in the genteel Blue Ox National Bank, and he was
received with flutters in the gray-velvet and stilly office of the
bank-president, Norton Trock.

Queenie Havock had the brassiest voice and the most predictable
anti-labor prejudices in Grand Republic; her hair looked like
brass, and her nose looked somewhat like brass, and she was such a
brass-hearted, cantankerous, vain, grasping, outrageous old brazen
harridan that people describing her simply had to add, "But Queenie
does have such a sense of humor and such a kind heart."

It was true.  She had the odd and interesting sense of humor of a
grizzly bear.



For a town which was shocked by the orgies of New York and
Hollywood, there was a good deal of drinking in Grand Republic.
All of them, except Chris Grau and Roy Drover, had three cocktails
before dinner.  Roy had four.

Throughout dinner, and during vacations from the toil of bridge,
the standard conversation of their class and era was carried on.
If Cass and his sister, Rose, did not chime in, they were too
accustomed to the liturgy to be annoyed by it.

This was the credo, and four years later, the war would make small
difference in its articles:

Maids and laundresses are now entirely unavailable; nobody at all
has any servants whatsoever; and those who do have, pay too much
and get nothing but impertinence.

Strikes must be stopped by law, but the Government must never in
any way interfere with industry.

All labor leaders are crooks.  The rank and file are all virtuous,
but misled by these leaders.

The rank and file are also crooks.

Children are now undisciplined and never go to bed till all-hours,
but when we were children, we went to bed early and cheerfully.

All public schools are atrocious, but it is not true that the
teachers are underpaid, and, certainly, taxes must be kept down.

Taxes, indeed, are already so oppressive that not one of the
persons here present knows where his next meal or even his next
motor car will come from, and these taxes are a penalty upon the
industrious and enterprising, imposed by a branch of the Black Hand
called "Bureaucracy."

America will not get into this war between Hitler and Great
Britain, which will be over by June, 1942.

But we are certainly against Fascism--because why?--because Fascism
just means Government Control, and we're against Government Control
in Germany OR in the United States!  When our Government quits
interfering and gives Industry the green light to go ahead, then
we'll show the world what the American System of Free Enterprise
can do to provide universal prosperity.

Boone Havock can still, at sixty, lick any seven Squareheads in his
construction gangs; he carries on his enterprises not for profit--
for years and years that has been entirely consumed by these taxes--
but solely out of a desire to give work to the common people.  He
once provided a fine running shower-bath for a gang in Kittson
County, but none of the men ever used it, and though he himself
started with a shovel, times have changed since then, and all
selfless love for the job has departed.

Dr. Drover also carries on solely out of patriotism.

The wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a woman who has so
betrayed her own class that she believes that miners and Negroes
and women are American citizens, ought to be compelled by law to
stay home.

We rarely go to the movies, but we did just happen to see a pretty
cute film about gang-murder.

The Reverend Dr. Quentin Yarrow, pastor of St. Anselm's P.E., is a
fine man, very broad-minded and well-read, and just as ready to
take a drink or shoot a game of golf as any regular guy.

Jay Laverick, of the flour mills, is a fine man, a regular guy,
always ready to shoot a game of golf or take a drink, but he has
been hitting up the hard stuff pretty heavy since his little wife
passed away, and he ought to remarry.

Cass should certainly remarry, and we suspect that it is Chris
Grau, also present, whom Cass has chosen and already kissed--at
least.

You can't change human nature.

We don't fall for any of these 'isms.

While we appreciate wealth--it shows that a man has ability--maybe
Berthold Eisenherz, with his brewery and half the properties on the
Blue Ox Range that are still producing iron ore, and this damn
showy picture of his by some Frenchman named Renoir, is TOO
wealthy.  He never shoots golf or shoots ducks, which looks pretty
queer for a man rich as that.  What the devil does he do with
himself?

Some of these smart-aleck critics claim that Middlewestern
businessmen haven't changed much since that book--what's its name?--
by this Communist writer, Upton Sinclair--"Babbitt," is it?--not
changed much since that bellyache appeared, some twenty years ago.
Well, we'd like to tell those fellows that in these twenty-odd
years, the American businessman has changed completely.  He has
traveled to Costa Rica and Cuba and Guatemala, as well as Paris,
and in the Reader's Digest he has learned all about psychology and
modern education.  He's been to a symphony concert, and by
listening to the commentators on the radio, he has now become
intimate with every branch of Foreign Affairs.

"As an ex-Congressman, don't you think that's true?" demanded Don
Pennloss.

"Why, I guess it is," said Cass.



He had tried to bring into the conversation the name of Jinny
Marshland, but he had found no links between her and taxes or Costa
Rica.  Now he blurted, "Say, I had a pleasant experience in court
today."

Roy Drover scoffed, "You mean you're still working there?  The
State still paying you good money for just yelling 'Overruled!'
every time a lawyer belches?"

"They seem to be.  Well, we had a pretty dull sidewalk case but one
witness was an unusually charming girl--"

"We know.  You took her into your chambers and conferred with her!"
bellowed Boone Havock.

"He did not.  He's no fat wolf like you, you lumberjack!" screamed
Queenie.

"Good gracious, I didn't know it was so late.  Quarter past eleven.
Can I give you a lift, Cass?" said Chris Grau.



4


"I'll drop you at your house, and if you ask me very prettily, I'll
come in for a night-cap," said Chris, outside the Drovers'.

"No, I'll tell you:  I'll drive you home in your car, and then walk
back to my house."

"Walk?  Back?  At this time of night?  Why, it's almost two miles!"

"People have walked two miles."

"Not unless they were playing golf."

"All right, I'll borrow a cane from Roy and a condensed-milk can
and knock it all the way back."

"Cassy, you are the most contrary man living!"

He hated being called "Cassy," like a slave in Harriet Beecher
Stowe, and he did not want Chris at his house.  For the hour or two
before he went to bed, late as usual, he wanted to be alone.  He
had to look after the welfare of his new friend, Cleo.  He wanted
to think, at least to think of what it was that he wanted to think
about.  And, like most men who sometimes complain of being lonely,
he just liked to be alone.

Chris did not go on teasing him.  He had to admit that, fusser and
arranger and thwarted mother though she was, Chris liked to do
whatever her men wanted.

At thirty-two, Christabel Grau was a round and soft and taffy-
colored virgin with strands of gray.  If Jinny Marshland was like
Cleo, a thin and restless and exciting young cat, Chris was the
serene tabby cuddled and humming on the hearth.

As they drove to her home, she speculated, with an unusual
irritation, "Didn't you think they were dull tonight?"

"I thought they talked about as usual."

"No, you didn't.  For some reason, you were sizing them up tonight,
and that started me noticing that--Oh, they're all darlings, and so
smart--my, I bet there isn't a doctor at the Mayos' that's as
clever as Roy--but they always make the same jokes, and they're so
afraid of seeming sentimental.  Roy wouldn't ever admit how he
loves his collection of Florida shells, and of course Boone is as
moony as a girl about his Beethoven records, and Queenie says he'll
sit by himself for hours listening to 'em, even the hard quartets,
and he's read all the lives of the composers, but he pretends he
just has the records to show off.  We're all so scared of getting
out of the groove here, don't you think?"

"Yes--yes," said Cass, who hadn't heard a word.

"But I do love Grand Republic so."

"Yes."



Chris lived on the top floor of her ancestral mansion on Beltrami
Avenue South, in the old part of town, in the valley.  And on that
street Cass had been born.  Forty years ago it had been the citadel
of the select residential district, where dwelt all that was rich
and seemly.  Cass's present home, Bergheim, was aged, but the other
houses on Ottawa Heights had been built since 1900.  These new
mansions did well in the matter of Mount Vernon pillars and lumpy
French-farmhouse towers, but they were plain as warehouses compared
with the Beltrami Avenue relics, which had an average of twenty-two
wooden gargoyles apiece, and one of which exhibited not only a
three-story tower but had a Tudor chimney running through it.

Many of these shrines had been torn down to save taxes, and others
turned into a home for nuns, a home for pious Lutheran old ladies,
a business college, a Y.W.C.A.  In seventy years, the Belgravia of
Grand Republic had been built and become an historic ruin, and men
whose own frail tissues had already lasted more than eighty years,
looking upon a granite castle now become a school for the anxious
daughters of improbable gentry, whispered in awe, "Why, that house
is old as the hills--almost seventy-five years old!"

But Chris Grau, after her mother's death, had thriftily remodeled
their three-story-and-basement residence into seven apartments,
keeping the top floor for herself and renting the rest.  "Chris is
an A 1 business-woman," said Roy Drover, and Roy would know.

Cass was "just coming in for a second, for one drink," but he felt
relaxed, he felt at home, and wanted to linger in that room,
feminine yet firm, lilac-scented, with soft yellow walls and chairs
in blue linen, with many flowers and a Dutch-tile fireplace and all
the newest new books about psychology and Yugo-Slavian prime
ministers, many of which Chris had started to read.

She mixed a highball for him, without talking about it.  She had
excellent Bourbon--she was a good and intelligent woman.  She sat
on the arm of his chair, a chair that was just deep enough for him;
she smoothed his hair, without ruffling it, she kissed his temple,
without being moist, and she slipped away and sat casually in her
own chair before he had time to think about whether he had any
interest in caresses tonight.

"Yes, we were all awfully obvious, tonight," she meditated.  "Why
didn't you bawl us out?"

"I'm not an uplifter, Chris.  People are what they are.  You learn
that in law-practice.  I haven't the impertinence to tell old
friends how I think they ought to talk."

"You pretend to be nothing but scholarship and exactness, but
you're really all affection for the people you know."

"You'll be saying I'm a sentimentalist next, Chris."

"Well, aren't you?  You even love cats."

"Hate 'em!"

--Why did I lie like that?

"Cassy, I--Oh, I'm sorry, CASS!"

--She even sees when I'm offended, without my having to rub her
nose in it.  I could be very solid and comfortable if I married
her.  She'd give warmth to that chilly old house.  We belong
together; we're both Old Middlewest, informal but not rackety.
Let's see:  Chris must be nine years younger than I am, and--

She was talking on:  "Speaking of uplift, I'll never give up hoping
that some day you'll be a United States Senator or on the Supreme
Court Bench.  There isn't a man in the United States who has more
to give the public."

"No, no, Chris, that's sheer illusion.  I'm simply a backwoods
lawyer.  You know, any legal gent looks considerably larger and
brighter, up there on the bench."

"I won't have you--"

"Besides, I feel lost in Washington.  One brown rabbit doesn't mean
much in that menagerie of cassowaries."

"What IS a cassowary?"

"Eh?  Damned if I know.  I think it's a bird."

"I'll look it up, right now."

"Not now.  I really want to talk to you."

"Well, it's about time!"

They smiled, secretly and warmly.  She seemed to him as intimate
and trusty as his own self when she went on:

"Maybe it was because Blanche was so ambitious that you disliked
Washington.  An impossible wife for you!"

"I didn't dislike the place--people walking under the trees in the
evening, like a village.  It's just that I have some kind of an
unformulated idea that I want to be identified with Grand Republic--
help in setting up a few stones in what may be a new Athens.  It's
this northern country--you know, stark and clean--and the brilliant
lakes and the tremendous prairies to the westward--it may be a new
kind of land for a new kind of people, and it's scarcely even
started yet."

"Oh, I know!"

--She loves this place, too.  She has roots, where Blanche has
nothing but aerial feelers.  Hm.  She's thirty-two.  She could
still have half a dozen children.  I'd like children around me, and
not just Mrs. Higbee and Cleo and a radio and a chessboard.

Chris came, not too impulsively, to kneel before him and clasp both
his hands, as she said trustingly:

"Of course you know best.  The only reason why I'd like to see you
in the Senate is that Grand Republic would be so proud of you!"
Her eyes were all his, her voice was gentle, and her lips were not
far from his.  "Though maybe that's silly, Cass, because I guess
the town couldn't be any prouder of you than it is already--no
prouder than I am, right now!"

There was a scent of apple-blossoms about her.  He leaned forward.
Without moving, she seemed to be giving herself to him.  Her hand
was at her soft bosom and her lips lifted.

Then, from far off, he heard the wailing of a frightened kitten,
gallant but hard-pressed.

Without willing it, he was on his feet, blurting good night,
hastening home to the small black absurdity of Cleo.



5


His panic was gone before he had stepped like a soldier eight
blocks in that nipping northern air and begun to mount the Heights.
The streets were friendly with the fresh-leaved elms and maples for
which Grand Republic was notable; the cherries were in blossom, and
the white lilacs and mountain ash.

There were dark groves along the way, and alleys that rose sharply
and vanished around curves, there were gates in brick walls and
hedges; a quality by night which was odd and exciting to Cass
Timberlane, a life to be guessed at, not too plain.  This was no
prairie town, flat and rectangular, with every virtue and crusted
sin exposed.

As he climbed, he could see the belated lights of farmhouses on the
uplands across the valley, the lights of buses down on Chippewa
Avenue, and in simplicity he loved his city now instead of fretting
that its typical evening conversation was dull--as dull as that of
Congressmen in the cloakroom or newspaper correspondents over the
poker table.  But he fretted over himself and his perilous single
state, with nervousness about the fact that Chris Grau was likely
at any time to pick him up and marry him.

--No, I'll never marry again.  I'd never be a good husband.  I'm
too solemn--maybe too stuffy.  I'm too devoted to the law.

--Am I?

--I must get married.  I can't carry on alone.  Life is too
meaningless when you have no one for whom you want to buy gifts, or
steal them.

--If I did marry, I think that this time I could make a go of it.
I understand women a LITTLE better now.  I shouldn't have minded
Blanche's love of tinsel, but just laughed at her.  And Chris
thinks of other people.  With her, I'd be happier and happier as
the years went by--

--Lord, that sounds so aged!  It was her youth that I liked so much
in that girl on the witness-stand yesterday--or today, was it?
What was her name again--Virginia something? . . .  Curious.  I
can't see her any more!



In law-school, at the University of Minnesota, Cass had listened to
a lecture by that great advocate, Hugo Lebanon of Minneapolis, had
gone up glowingly to talk with him, and had been invited to dinner
at the Lebanon marble palace on Lake of the Isles.  There was a
tall, pale, beautiful daughter named Blanche.

So Cass married the daughter.

She was emphatic about being a pure Anglo-Saxon who went right
back, even if Warwickshire remained curiously unstirred about her
going right back, to a gray stone house in Warwick.  She was the
more vigorously pure about it because there were whispers of Jewish
blood.  She found it hard to put up with the mongrel blood of the
furniture-dealing Timberlanes, and she was revolted when Cass
estimated that through his father, he was three-eighths British
stock, one-sixteenth French Canadian, and one-sixteenth Sioux
Indian--whence, he fondly believed, came his tall, high-cheeked
spareness--and through his mother he was two-eighths Swedish, one-
eighth German, one-eighth Norwegian.

Blanche did not, after the magnitude and salons of Minneapolis,
much like Grand Republic.  When she came there as a bride, in 1928,
the Renoir had not yet arrived, so there was no one to talk to.

She encouraged Cass to run for Congress; she served rye, with her
own suave hands, to aldermen and county commissioners.  Cass and
she attained Washington, and she loved it like a drunkard, and
loved the chance of meeting--at least of being in the same populous
rooms with--French diplomats and Massachusetts senators and
assorted Roosevelts.  When Cass felt swamped, as a lone
representative among more than four hundred, when he longed for the
duck pass and his law-office and the roaring of Roy Drover, when he
refused to run for re-election, Blanche rebelled.  She was not
going back to listen to Queenie Havock shrieking about her love-
life, she shouted, and Cass could not blame her, though he did sigh
that there were also other sounds audible in Grand Republic.

There was a mild, genial Englishman, Fox Boneyard, an importer of
textiles, who lived in New York but was often about Washington; he
had the unfortunate illusions about beautiful American women that
Englishmen sometimes do have, and he also had more money than the
Honorable Cass Timberlane.

Blanche married him.

During the divorce, Cass did have sense enough to refuse to pay
alimony to a woman who was marrying a richer man, and who had never
consented to having children.  But he still loved Blanche enough to
hate her, and to hate convulsively the sight of a coat she had left
behind, and the wrinkles in it that had come from her strong
shoulders.  He underwent the familiar leap from partisanship and
love to enmity and a sick feeling that he had been betrayed.

He grimly finished his last days in Congress, and then quite
dramatically went to pieces.  He was a feeling man, and with a
whisky breath and unshaved, he was an interesting figure in water-
front cafes in Trinidad and Cartagena, and to his white cruel love
he paid the tribute of being sick in toilets and talking to other
saintly idiots about having lost his soul.

But even love for Blanche could not keep Cass Timberlane at this
romantic business for more than two months, and after another six,
most of them sedately spent in and about the Temple in London, he
returned to the affection of Grand Republic, and practised law for
three more years before he was elected to the bench.

Election was not easy.  The routine politicians disliked him
because he had left Congress, because he could not be guided, and
because he made fun of all clauses in political speeches beginning
with "than whom."  The churches, particularly the Lutherans, who
were powerful in Radisson County, disapproved of him because he had
been divorced.  The Republicans were doubtful about him because he
had been amiable with Farmer-Labor leaders, and the Farmer-
Laborites distrusted him because he lived in a large house.  In
fact, there was really no reason for his being elected except that
he was known to be honest, courageous, and learned, and that he had
once lent a grateful and active Norwegian farmer five dollars.

But he was a judge now, and the district had the fixed habit of
him, and if he would only marry a sound churchwoman, like
Christabel Grau, and give a little more attention to the Chamber of
Commerce and to his bridge game, he might go on forever, a sound
and contented Leading Citizen.



6


He was thinking of Chris Grau as he entered the long hallway of
Bergheim, lit only by a bogus-ancient pierced-brass lamp.  Then
Cleo, the midnight-colored kitten, was galloping up to him, warming
his ankles, purring frantically, and with that ecstatic rhythm
there came back to him Jinny Marshland's name and the vision of her
face that he had lost: the surprising smallness of her face, the
absurd hawk nose, the jaunty hair hanging to her shoulders, the
bright curiosity in her eyes, her plunging youthful walk.

He lifted Cleo and thought how light Jinny would be to lift.  Cleo
sat in his lap while he worked out a chess-problem for nightcap;
she moaned only a little when he played the flute for a moment; and
when he put her back into the box filled with clipped paper that
Mrs. Higbee had provided behind the kitchen stove, Cleo made a
business of curling round and sleeping, as a cat who belonged there
and liked it.

"A very sound kitten," Cass pronounced, and went comfortably up to
bed, pleasant in the thought that tomorrow the kitten would be
here, that some time this week he could most certainly see Jinny.

He awoke rigid under the familiar torture which some dozen times a
year the mysterious Enemy inflicted upon him: the torture of being
bored by the too-frequent presence of his own self, bored to cold
emptiness by the inescapable and unchanging sight and sound of Cass
Timberlane, a man whom he usually respected, sometimes found
slightly funny, but of whose complaints and futile plans, round and
round in the mind, of whose demands for incessant attention, of
whose mirrored gawky face, of whose heavy voice, a murky cloud
forever in the air about him, he was sick to a state of fury.
Could he never get away from that man?  Was he condemned forever to
awaken to the sight of that thick brown plowman's-hand on the
blanket, to the intrusiveness of that man's inevitable whining
daydream:  "I will find my companion; I'll go on a journey
somewhere and I'll find her; I'll tell her about Grand Republic and
she'll want to come here, and we'll have a real family, with trust
and serenity, and I'll be a judge that--people will say, 'His court
is the model of fairness and mercy,' and she will be glad of it;
SHE--"

Oh, so that intrusive man was going to fall in love now, was he,
with his "Look at me!  How exciting I am!"  If he could only forget
the name and essence of Cass Timberlane and be blissfully
submerged, not in some rainbow-striped Oversoul but in the
tenderness of one other person.

Then he was sick of being sick of too-much-self, and with the
bright thought of Jinny he drove out his tired brooding upon his
brooding.

She actually did exist.  He had seen her.  In her was tolerant
friendship, and in her fresh cheeks and young bosom there was
promise of salvation by passion.  With her he could escape into the
refuge of the Quiet Mind, away equally from the lonely Cass and
from a world of booming politics and oratory.

Was Jinny too young for him?  Nonsense!  He was only forty-one, and
stronger than any of these jazz-mad youngsters.  And she would make
him still younger, along with her.

He went to sleep in dreams of a Jinny to whom, actually, he had
never said anything whatever except, "I think you'd better confine
yourself to answering the questions, without comment, Miss
Marshland."

There was nothing of the repining hermit in the Cass who leaped up
in the morning, greeted Cleo, who considered his toes very funny,
had a shower-bath and a scrupulous shave (telling himself, as
always, that the electric razor was a very fine Modern Invention),
greeted Mrs. Higbee, wolfed griddle cakes and sausages, and tramped
out upon the fresh May morning and the courts of law.

George Hame, his court-reporter, greeted him filially, though
George was only three years younger, and filled his inkwell and his
water carafe and opened his mail.

The mail was of the usual: sixteen widows who had been cheated, of
whom seven sounded as though they ought to have been; and sixteen
organizations which desired the Judge to send in a little
contribution.

The other two judges of the district came in cordially:  Judge
Stephen Douglas Blackstaff, the Old Roman, and Judge Conrad
Flaaten, who was Lutheran but gay.  Judge Blackstaff wanted a
cigarette and Judge Flaaten wanted advice, and between them and the
mail and George Hame's admiration, Cass felt like his own man
again, resolute and happy in his workshop.

When he marched out into the court room and the bailiff pounded his
table and the nine persons present, besides the jury and the
officers of court, all made motions somewhat like rising in his
honor, then all the dread of too-much-self had gone out of Cass,
along with much of his excitement about a stray young woman named
Marshland, and he was again the tribal chieftain on his leather
throne.

The case of Miss Tilda Hatter vs. the City of Grand Republic was
concluded, and her many friends will be pleased to know that the
jury was out for only sixteen minutes and awarded her $200 out of
the $500 for which she had sued.  Judge Timberlane reflected that
Miss Hatter was almost certain to put on a spread for Jinny and her
other boarders, with Bourbon, Coca-Cola, liverwurst, stuffed
olives, and chocolate layer cake.

He went for lunch not to the proper Federal Club, where bankers and
lawyers and grain-dealers sat around being high-class, but to the
Athletic Club, which admitted Jews and Unitarians.  He hoped to see
Lucius Fliegend, the pasteboard-toy manufacturer, Jinny's boss.

On his way he went along Chippewa Avenue and saw the humble
magnificence of the town's business center: the up-rearing
limestone and aluminum of the Blue Ox National Bank, the bookshop
that with a building of imitation half-timber tried to suggest the
romance and antiquity of England, the one complete department
store, Tarr's Emporium, with four vast floors crammed with
treasures from Burma and Minneapolis, and the Bozard Beaux Arts
Women's Specialty Shops, which everyone said was just as smart as
New York or Halle Brothers of Cleveland.

Among the bustling citizens who looked like everybody else on every
principal avenue from Bangor to Sacramento, there were trout-
fishermen in high boots and Finnish section-hands and Swedish corn-
planters from the prairie.

Grand Republic was metropolitan-looking in its black-glass and
green-marble shop fronts, its uniformed traffic policemen with Sam
Browne belts and pistol holsters, its florists' windows and La
Marquise French Candy Shop, but it was small enough so that he was
greeted--usually as "Judge," often as "Cass," occasionally as
"Jedge"--five times on every block, while the Policemen touched
their caps in salute.  Grand Republic was small enough so that a
Mrs. George Hame had at least met a Mrs. Webb Wargate, and ventured
to say, in church lobby, "Well, how is your boy Jamie doing in
school, Mrs. Wargate?"  It was small enough so that the Judge could
know how the whole city worked, but it was also small enough so
that Harley Bozard, coming out of his shop, already knew that Cass
had taken Chris Grau home last evening, and leered, "What's this I
hear you're going to drive into the matrimonial slew again, Cass?"

It was all friendly; it restored his soul.  He was too used to them
to note the hideousness of a black old stone hotel with massive
portals and torn lace curtains, and the car-parking lots that were
like sores on the wholesome limbs of the streets, or to reflect
that the only design for planning the city had always been the
dollar-sign.  What of that, when he could be greeted "H' are you,
old boy!" by Frank Brightwing, the real-estate man, who was
melodiously drunk on every Saturday evening and on every Sunday
morning, at the Baptist Church, was as unaffectedly pious and
hopeful as the cherubs he so much resembled.

The moment Cass was inside the railroad-station noisiness of the
Athletic Club, he hunted up Lucius Fliegend, a gentle person with a
thin beard, who might have been a professor of Greek.

He confessed, "Lucius, I'm ashamed that I haven't been around here
lately, looking for a game of chess."

"You young fellows, you politicians, don't appreciate chess.  In
the good old days here, the lumbermen and the gamblers in iron-
leases used to go out and steal a million dollars and come home and
drink a quart of red-eye and sit down to six hours of chess.  Now,
they steal only a thousand, and then play bridge and drink gin, a
lady's drink.  Will you choose your pawn?"

After the game (which Lucius won), Cass spoke abruptly, for this
was an honest and understanding man.  "Yesterday in court I saw a
young lady who says she works for you.  Miss Marshland.  I'd like
to really meet her."

"Jinny is a lovely girl.  Erica and I are fond of her.  She is
ambitious, but not in the sharp, bitter way of so many of these
young career women.  She's quite a good draftsman.  She has a nice
fantastic taste--she does some very funny pasteboard dolls for me.
And she's beautiful, but she's also a frail, over-engined girl who
will either burn herself out or fall in love with some appealing
scamp who'll break her heart, unless some solid man traps her
first."

"But would she LIKE a solid man?"

"I doubt it.  And, though he'd find it interesting, I don't know
how much he'd enjoy nursing a young black panther."

"She's probably already engaged."

"I don't think so; merely has a lot of young men friends.  But with
all her fire, she's domestic.  Her father is a druggist up here in
Pioneer Falls, a pleasant fellow.  He taught Jinny her Latin at the
age of ten.  Of course she forgot it at the age of twelve.  She's a
good girl and--"

"When will you invite us to dinner together?"

"Some time soon."

"No!  Much sooner than that!"

"Very well.  Next Saturday evening, provided Jinny isn't out
canoeing with some handsome young man."

"Excellent!"

He was thinking of that "handsome young man" and astonished to find
in himself a jealousy not coy but bitter and real.  He hated
jealousy and all its rotten fruits, as he had seen them in court,
hated that sour suspiciousness which ferments in love, yet over a
girl to whom he had once said just fourteen words, he was mildly
homicidal toward an imaginary young man.

"I seem to be falling in love," he thought profoundly.



7


Cass was disappointed when Mrs. Fliegend telephoned to him not to
dress for dinner.  He would have liked to show Jinny how stately he
could be.  But she reported that Jinny was "so thrilled to meet
you; she thinks you were wonderful on the bench--so wise--and of
course Lucius and I do, too, Judge."

He stroked Cleo, and sounded like her.

After pondering on precedents, he decided that it was far enough on
in the spring for him to wear his white-flannel suit, with the tie
from Marshall Field's.  While he put these on, gravely, as though
he were studying a brief, he wondered how much he was going to like
Jinny.  So far, he merely loved her.

Would she be one of these Professional Youths?  Would she reek with
gum and with the slang suitable to it:  "Oh boy!" and "No soap" and
"That's what you think"?

"Oh, quit it!" he said, aloud--and Cleo promised that she would.

He was so elegant tonight that he drove to the Fliegends', instead
of walking.

The Fliegends' bulky old brown house was on South Beltrami, a block
from Chris Grau's.

He felt guilty of disloyalty to Chris in loving young Jinny, but he
felt even wickeder as he reflected that though he had been born
only three blocks from the Fliegends', he had not been in their
house since boyhood, and could not remember its rooms.  Probably
Chris and Bradd Criley and Boone Havock had never been inside it.
In "The Friendly City," as we call it, we don't shoot Jews and
Catholics and Socialists and saints.  We just don't go calling on
them.

Then Mrs. Fliegend was beaming on him at the door, while he
imagined her saying, "You phony politician!  You've never
condescended to come to our house till you wanted us to play
procurers for you.  You, the great Anglo-Saxon judge and gentleman--
you Sioux bastard!  Get out!"

Mrs. Fliegend must have wondered why Judge Timberlane seemed so
pleased by her mild greeting.

Looking past his hosts into the square living-room which made up
half the first floor, he saw no Jinny, but only a great blankness
where she should have been.

--Maybe she isn't coming?  Ditched me for that young man in the
canoe?

Mrs. Fliegend was soothing him, "Oh, she'll be here, Judge!"

--Is my youthful romance as obvious as all that?

Remembering it only from childhood, he had expected the interior of
the Fliegend house to be Oriental and over-rich.  But it was the
elder German and Yankee pioneers who had satin-brocaded walls and
Tudor fireplaces.  Here, the walls were of white paneled wood,
dotted with old maps of Minnesota and portraits of its early
heroes:  Ramsey, Sibley, Steele, Pike, Taliaferro.

"I didn't know you were such a collector of Minnesota items," said
Cass.

--That sounded fatuous and condescending.  I didn't mean to be.

Lucius explained, "I was born in Minnesota, in Long Prairie, and my
father before me, near Marine Mills, where my grandfather settled.
He fought through the Civil War, in the Third Minnesota.  We are of
the old generation."

Cass was meditating upon his rare gifts of ignorance when Jinny
Marshland flew into the room.

She was no wild little hawk now, but a young lady.  Her hair was
put up, sleek and tamed, and she wore a dress of soft black with,
at her pleated black girdle, one silver rose.  She was quick-moving
and friendly, and her greeting was almost excessive:  "I'm
terrified to meet you, Judge, after seeing you in court.  I thought
you were going to send me to Stillwater for contempt.  You won't
now, will you?"

Yet no spark came to him from her, and she was just another pretty
girl, another reed bending to the universal south wind.

The other guests, a couple who came in with shy bumptiousness, made
him feel as guilty at his neglect of them as had the Fliegends.
They were Dr. Silbersee, refugee Jewish eye-ear-throat specialist
from Vienna, 'cellist in the amateur double-quartet that was Grand
Republic's only musical wonder, and his wife Helma, who was equally
serious about the piano, Apfelkuchen, and the doctrines of the
post-Freudian psychoanalysts.

Cass had been fretting all week, after his session with Chris Grau,
that the local conversation was dull.  He had wished, for the
benefit of his unconscious protegee Jinny, to exhibit what he
conceived to be a real European conversazione, complete with Rhine
wine and seltzer.  He got it, too, this evening, and he didn't care
much for it.  He realized again, as he had in Washington and in
waterfront dives in Trinidad, that most conversation is dull.
Aside from shop-talk, which includes the whispering of lovers,
anything printed, a time-table or the rich prose of a tomato-catsup
label, is more stimulating than any talk, even the screaming of six
economists and an intellectual actress.

At dinner, the Fliegends and the Silbersees said that this fellow
Hitler was no good, that it had been warm today, that it might be
warmer tomorrow, that Toscanini was a good conductor, that rents in
Grand Republic were very high just now, and that there was a Little
Armenian Restaurant in Milwaukee.

It was, in perfection, New York, minus the taxi horns, and still
Cass was not satisfied, and, so far as he could see, neither was
Jinny.

At first, as the conversation took fire, she hadn't so much as a
chip to throw into it.  She sat mute, with her hands folded small
and flat and meek, and she had no observations on the subject of
Debussy, regarding which Lucius had represented her as highly
eloquent.  Cass decided that she was stupid, and that there wasn't
much to be said for himself either.

But he noticed how quickly her dark eyes turned from speaker to
speaker; how she weighed, and did not think very much of, her
ponderous elders.  Slowly he was hypnotized by her again; he felt
her independence and her impatience to do things.  Restless under
this middle-aged droning, he wanted to be on her side.  And he was
a little afraid of her.

But he made a good deal of progress in his romance.  To his
original fourteen words of address to her, he had now added sixty-
seven others, including, "No, no, you weren't late.  I think I was
ahead of time.  I guess my watch is fast."  No flowery squire could
have said it more colorfully.

The Fliegends were lenient hosts, and after dinner (roast goose and
potato pancakes, such heavenly stuff as Grand Republic rarely
knew), they wedged the Silbersees in beside the grand piano, and
sent Cass and Jinny "out to see the garden."

Like most houses in Grand Republic, where the first settlers
huddled together instead of taking ten acres for each garden, the
Fliegend abode was too close to its neighbors.  But they had
planted cedar hedges, and made a pool surrounded with wicker
benches that were, surprisingly, meant to be sat upon.  Cass and
Jinny did sit upon them, and he did not in the least feel that he
was sitting upon a pink cloud.  He was anxious to find out, while
still posing as a big superior man, whether Jinny considered him a
stuffy old party.

"Nice dinner," he said.

"Wasn't it?"

"This, uh, this Roy Harris they were talking about--do you know his
music?"

"Just a little."

"Uh--"

"I've just heard some of it played."

"Yes, uh--I guess--I guess Dr. Silbersee is a very fine musician."

"Yes, isn't he."

"Yes."

"You've heard him play, Judge?"

"Yes, uh--oh yes, I've heard him play.  A very fine 'cellist."

"Of course I don't know music well enough to tell, but I think he
must be and--"

Then it broke:

"Jinny!  Were you bored tonight?"

"How?"

"Our pompous talk."

"Why, I thought it was lovely talk.  I was so interested about the
conductors:  Mitropoulos and Bruno Walter."

"Oh.  You like musicians?"

"Love 'em.  If I really knew any.  But one thing did bother me."

"What?"

"I thought YOU were bored.  I was watching you, Judge."

"And I was watching you."

"Two kids among the grown-ups!"

They both laughed very much, and he was grateful for being included
in her conspiracy of youth.

The silent Jinny talked enough now.  "I thought they were all so
nice, and oh boy! are they ever learned!  I guess the people in
Vienna must be like them.  But I wanted to hear YOU talk."

"Why?"  It was too flagrant even to be called "fishing."

"I wanted to know how do criminals get that way, and can you help
them, and--I'll bet they're awed by you."

"Not much."

"I would be.  I was sort of disappointed by the court room, though.
I thought there'd be a whole mob, holding their breaths, and
sixteen reporters writing like mad, but they were--oh, as if they
were waiting for a bus.  But then when I looked at you--honestly,
you scared me, Judge!"

"Now, now!"

"You DID!"

"How could I?  Judge Blackstaff might, but I'm just a hometown
lawyer."

"You are not a home-town lawyer!  Oh, I mean you are, of course,
but I mean--you aren't ANY home-town lawyer!"  She sounded proud of
him, and eager.  "On the bench, you looked as if you knew
everything, and maybe you might be kind of sorry for me, for having
murdered my Aunt Aggie and stolen the sewing-machine oil-can, but
you'd put me away for ten years, for the good of society.  Wouldn't
you?"

"No, I'm afraid I'd resign from the bench first, Jinny."

"M!"  She sounded gratified, and with some energy he kept himself
from seizing her hand.  It was fated that he should now take the
next step, with "You came by bus, didn't you?  May I drive you
home?"

He, it seemed, might.

He said good night to the Fliegends and Silbersees with a feeling
of having enlarged his knowledge of Grand Republic.  When Jinny was
beside him in his car, the major purposes of his life seemed to
have been accomplished, even if he could express the ultimate glory
only by a hesitating, "It was a very pleasant evening, didn't you
think?"



8


The boarding-house of Miss Tilda Hatter was the hobohemia of Grand
Republic.  It occupied the two upper floors of a senile brick
building near Paul Bunyan Avenue, in a land of railroad sidings and
six-man factories.  On the ground floor of the building was the
Lilac Lady Lunchroom: T. Hatter, Prop., at whose counter and four
tousled tables eternal and poetic Youth could drink coffee and eat
blueberry pie a la mode, with ice cream disgustingly but sweetly
melting down into the blue-smeared debris, and talk about the high
probability of their going to Minneapolis and singing on the radio,
or going to Chicago and studying interior decorating.

Above the restaurant were a dozen bedrooms, with one bath, and a
living-room agreeably littered with skis, skates, unstrung tennis
rackets, stenographers' note-books, manuals on air-conditioning and
gas-engine construction, burnt-out portable radio sets, empty
powder compacts, empty gin bottles, and the Poetic Works of John
Donne, with the covers missing.  These upper rooms were reached by
a covered wooden outside staircase.

The building had once been a dry-goods store and once the offices
of a co-operative farmers' insurance company, and once a butcher-
shop with a fancy-house above it, in which two young ladies had
murdered the melancholy butcher.  But now it was all orderly as a
Y.W.C.A., and rather like it in the excessive amount of cigarette-
smoking.

As Cass and Jinny drove up to it, she insisted, "You must come up a
minute and say hello to Miss Hatter.  She's convinced the jury gave
her all that money only because you told them to, and she's one
person that really worships you."

"Meaning that somebody else doesn't?"

His wheedling tone, the distractedness with which he turned his
face toward her and so ran the car up on the curb as he was
parking, were not to be distinguished from the large idiocies of
any other injudicious young lover.  She answered only, "You'd be
surprised!  Come, it's one flight up."

He had a daring hope that this girl, so desirable, with her bright
face and young breast, did see him as the great man scattering
nobility from the high throne of the bench.  He knew that he wasn't
anything of the kind, but merely a business umpire in a dusty hall.
Yet if she could have such faith in him, she might lift him to
whatever greatness she imagined in him.  With solemnity and love he
followed her up the flat-sounding steps and into the boarding-house
salon.

Miss Hatter was mixing a heady beverage of gin, Coca-Cola, creme de
rose, and tea, standing at a sloppy pine table, while four young
people sat near her on the floor--not because there were no chairs
but because they were at the age and intellectual claimancy when
one does sit on the floor.

Miss Hatter screamed, "Oh, Judge!"  As though he were a bishop or a
movie star.  "Jinny said she'd try to get you to drop in, but I
never dreamed she WOULD!"

--So this young woman had planned to have me drive her home.  Am I
gratified or do I feel let down?  Anyway, she looks so charming, in
fact, well, so aristocratic in her little black dress and that one
silver rose, among these hit-or-a-miss yearners here.

Miss Hatter was going on:  "Folks, this is Judge Timberlane.  My,
this is an honor.  I'll say it is!"

Jinny introduced her four companions of the arts as they sulkily
rose and dusted their knees.  They were not too young--twenty-four
to thirty--but the placid disregard of them by Grand Republic still
kept them youthful and belligerent.  They were Lyra Coggs,
assistant city librarian, Wilma Gunton, head of the cosmetics
department at Tarr's Emporium, Tracy Oleson, secretary to powerful
Webb Wargate and a young man who seemed to Cass interesting enough
to be looked at with suspicion, Eino Roskinen, aged twenty-four,
butter-maker at the Northward Co-operative Dairy but, as Jinny
explained, a born theater director.

Eino was a darkly serious young Finn; he looked at Jinny with what
Cass nervously saw to be the greatest fondness and at Cass with the
greatest dislike, so that Cass felt like an old windbag, though he
had as yet said nothing more than, "Well!  Good evening."

--So the struggle for her has started already.  And I'm not going
to give her up even to you, my Byronic young friend.

He was certain that Eino was an evil whelp, who meant no good to
Jinny.  He sat on a chair, near Miss Hatter, the only other person
of his age and uncomfortable dignity, while all five of the young
people were on the floor, chattering--especially the Jinny who had
been so silent at the Fliegends':

"You know, Judge, we think we have an intellectual center here.
Oh, we're tremendous.  Wilma is going to New York to start a
cosmetics company there--green lip-sticks--as soon as she can save
enough money to ride there in a box-car.  But our star is Eino.  He
has Theories.  He says that the new America isn't made up of
British stock and Irish and Scotch, but of the Italians and Poles
and Icelanders and Finns and Hungarians and Slovaks.  People like
you and me are the Red Indians of the country.  We'll either pass
out entirely or get put on reservations, where we can do our Yankee
tribal dances and wear our native evening clothes undisturbed.
Isn't that the idea, Eino?"

"Not entirely, Jinx.  We may allow full citizenship to some of the
Yankee tribesmen, if they learn the principles of cooperation and
give up their medicine-men--pastors they call 'em, I believe.  But
judges, now--I don't know about them.  They're too corrupted by the
native voodoo.  I don't know whether they can learn to speak the
American language."

"Don't you dare to say anything against Judge Timberlane!" screamed
Miss Hatter, and wondered why they all laughed at her, though
Cass's contributory laughter was on the pale side.

He was deciding, with a thrill of reality, that he hated Eino.

--That fatuous young pup!  Daring to call her "Jinx."  Or even
"Jinny," for that matter.  "Miss Virginia" is good enough for you,
my friend.  You and your Hunkies!  Just try bucking us Yankees!
By--the--way, my friend, do you happen to know that I'm scarcely
Yankee at all, that I'm part Scandinavian and part Sioux?  Of
course you don't!  And it makes me sick, when I wonder whether this
Eino has ever dared to put his arms around Jinny or kiss her lips.
Sick!

All the while he knew that he did not mean any of it, that Eino was
probably an excellent fellow.

--Funny.  I never was jealous like this about Blanche.  Wonder
where she is now.  I'll bet she's keeping that poor English husband
of hers busy digging out viscounts for her!



Miss Hatter, addressing him constantly as "Your Honor," was
explaining the wonderful things she was going to do with her
litigious $200, including false teeth for an aged cousin resident
in Beloochistan, Minnesota.  Tracy Oleson talked about canoe trips
in the Crane Lake country.  Jinny alleged that Dr. Silbersee had
once absently tried to remove tonsils from his 'cello.  But Eino
was scornful and still.

Cass was a friendly villager, and accustomed to friendliness from
others.  Even the forger whom he condemned to the state
Penitentiary seemed to feel that it was all very reasonable, and
Cass was dismayed now to feel hostility in the Eino to whom he was
entirely hostile!  Suddenly Cass wanted to run off to the security
of slippers and Cleo and a chess-problem.  In a wondrously nervous
state, between humble haughtiness and haughty humbleness before a
dramaturgic butter-maker, he tacked successfully for an hour, and
he was rewarded, when he said that it was time to go, by Jinny's
coming down the outside staircase with him.

The step at the foot of the stairs was no romantic site; it was a
scuffed and scabby plank which creaked.  In the small yard outside,
an old hen of a maple tree perched amid patchy short grass, and the
rusty old iron fence smelled of rusty old iron.  Across the street,
a man in a lighted upper window stood scratching himself.

But she was in the half-darkness with him; he saw her throat above
the soft black dress, he caught the scent of her hair, surely a
different scent from any other in the world.  She was herself
different from anyone else, a complete individual, courageous and
joyful and yet so fragile that she must be protected.  He held her
hand, and quaked with the feeling of it.  There was no doubt now,
he decided, that he was utterly in love with her, that her small
dim presence was a vast blazing temple.  She was not something that
he had imagined in his loneliness.  She was life.

He stumbled, "Look, Jinny.  Have you ever been to the Unstable for
dinner?"

"Just once."

"Like it?"

"It's fun."

"Will you dine with me there, next Tuesday or Wednesday?"

"I'd be glad to--say Tuesday."

The fact that she had chosen the earlier day was enough to send him
home singing "Mandalay," with much feeling and no tune.

After one in the morning, he sat in his leather chair and Cleo sat
on the hearth.  He was posing for himself a legal question:  Was he
trying to seduce Jinny?

That would be extremely agreeable, if it could be accomplished, and
not much more criminal than setting fire to a children's hospital.
Reputable men did do it.  It was obvious, he thought, that she was
a little too young and too spirited to marry him, and even if she
would accept him, would it not be a wickedness to introduce her in
that dullest of all sets in Grand Republic, to which, by habit, he
belonged?  He had seen girls, lively and defiant, marry
householders on Ottawa Heights, and within ten years become faintly
wrinkled at the neck, and given to stating as rigidly as their own
horrid grandmothers that all servants are thankless brutes.

And how well did Jinny understand him?  Would she be able to endure
it if he took off the grave judicial manner which he wore for
protection, and betrayed himself as a Midwestern Don Quixote, one-
sixteenth Sioux and one-sixteenth poet: a bridge-player who thought
that bridge was dull, a Careful Investor who sympathized with
hoboes, a calm and settled householder who envied Thoreau his cabin
and Villon his wild girls?

"I ought to marry some woman who likes what I'm trying to do.
Though I suppose I ought to find out first just what I am trying to
do!"

He ended his brooding with a cry that made Cleo leap protesting
into the air:

"I do love that girl so!"



9


The Unstable had been a stable and it had been a speakeasy and now
it was the local Pre-Catelan, nine miles out of town, on the bank
of the Big Eagle River, facing the rugged bluffs.  The interior was
in bright green, with chairs of polished steel and crimson
composition tables decorated with aluminum blossoms, in semi-
circular booths, and it had an orchestra of piano, saxophone,
violin, and drum.  By day, piano was a dry-goods clerk, saxophone
was a Wargate warehouse-hand, violin was a lady hair-dresser, and
drum was asleep.  Its food was the standard Steak & Chicken, but
its whisky was excellent.  Its most pious contribution to living
was that in this land where autumn too often trips on the heels of
spring and, except on picnics, people dine inside, it did have
outdoor tables, not of composition but of honest, old-fashioned,
beer-stained pine.

At such a table, in a grape-arbor, Cass and Jinny had dined slowly,
looking at each other oftener than at the crisp chicken, the fresh
radishes.  They had talked of their childhoods, and they seemed
united by fate when they found that he had, as a boy, hunted
prairie chickens in the vast round of wheat stubble just beyond her
native village of Pioneer Falls.

He urged, "You know what I'd like most to do, besides learning a
little law and maybe having a farm way up in the hills above the
Sorshay Valley?  I'd like to paddle a canoe, or at least my half of
the canoe, from New York City to Hudson's Bay, by way of the Hudson
and the Great Lakes and the old fur-trappers' trail at Grand
Portage, up here on Lake Superior.  It would take maybe six months,
camping out all that time.  Wouldn't that be exciting?"

"Ye-es."

"Do you think you'd like to go along?"

"I don't know--I'm afraid I've never planned anything like that."

"You can come in imagination, can't you?"

"Oh--maybe.  Provided we could go to New Orleans--in imagination!--
to rest up afterward, and live in the French Quarter in a flat with
an iron balcony, and eat gumbo.  Could we do that?"

"Why not!"

They saw that they need not all their lives stick to courts and
factories and city streets, but actually do such pleasant,
extravagant things . . . if they shaped life together.

He cried, "Approval from the higher court!  Look!"

The moon had come out from a black-hearted, brazen-edged cloud, to
illuminate the wide barley-fields on the uplands across the river,
with one small yellow light in a farmhouse, and the fantastically
carved and poplar-robed bluffs of the Big Eagle.  Wild roses gave
their dusty scent, and inside the rackety roadhouse, the jukebox
softly played Jerome Kern.  It was everything that was most
Christmas-calendar and banal:  June, moon, roses, song, a man and a
girl; banal as birth and death and war, banal and eternal; the
Perfect Moment which a man knows but a score of times in his whole
life.  All respectable-citizen thoughts about whether they should
be married, and should they keep the maple bedstead in the gray
room, were burned out of him, and he loved the maid as simply and
fiercely as any warrior.  He ceased to be just Cass Timberlane; he
was a flame-winged seraph guarding the gentle angel.  They floated
together in beauty.  They were not doing anything so common as to
hold hands; it was their spirits that reached and clung, made
glorious by the moment that would die.

When the moon was gone under a marbled cloud and the music ceased
and there was only silence and lingering awe, she whispered, so low
that he was not quite sure that she had said it, "That frightened
me!  It was too beautiful.  'On such a night--'  Oh, Cass!"

She was chatty and audible enough afterward, and she carefully
called him "Judge," but he knew that they were intimates.

As they drove home she prattled, "Judge, I have an important
message.  Tilda Hatter wants to give a party for you at the
boarding-house--all of us do, of course."

"Except Eino, who objects?"

She giggled.  "But don't you think his objection is flattering?
I've only heard him object before to Henry James and Germany and
stamp-collecting. . . .  You will come?  You'll love Lyra Coggs."

"I'm sure I will.  She's a great girl. . . .  What are you
snickering at?"

"You do try so hard not to be the judge, tolerating us noisy
brats!"

"I swear that's not so.  Surely you're onto me by now.  More than
anything else, I'm still the earnest schoolboy that wants to learn
everything.  And there's so much you can teach me.  I certainly
don't regard myself as aged, at only forty-one, but still YOU--you
were born the year of the Russian revolution, you've always known
airplanes and the radio.  I want to understand them as you do."

"And the things _I_ want to learn!  Biology and hockey and
Swedish!"

"How about anthropology and crop-rotation?"

"Okay.  And fencing and flower-arrangement and gin-rummy and
Buddhism."

"Do most of the kids at Miss Hatter's want to learn anything?  They
sound smug to me."

"They are not!  If you knew how we talk when we're alone!  Oh,
maybe too much slang and cursing and talk about sex."

He winced.  He did not care for the picture of Eino Roskinen
"talking about sex" with a helpless Jinny . . . if she was
helpless.

"But that's because we're sick of the pompous way that all you
older people go on, over and over, about politics and affairs in
Europe and how you think we drink too much."

"Well, don't you?"

"Maybe.  But WE know how to handle OUR liquor."

"I doubt it."

"So do I!"  She laughed, and he was in love with her again, after a
measureless five seconds during which he had detested her for the
egotism of youth.  She piped on, "But I do think we're a terribly
honest lot."

"You don't think I'm the kind of politician that hates honesty?"

She said her "Oh, you're different," and the good man found the
wisdom to stop talking and to feel the magic of having her there
cozily beside him: her smooth arms, her hands folded in her lap,
her thin corn-yellow dress and the small waist belted with
glittering jet whose coolness his hand wanted to follow.  She was
there with him, this girl who was different from any female since
Eve, and he was thus sanctified. . . .  And did it really matter
when she unfolded the fairy hands and smoked her seventh cigarette
that evening?

Didn't the vestal Chris smoke too much?

The intrusion of Chris worried him.  She had no hold on him but--
well--if Chris saw him driving with this girl, there would be
trouble.

--Why should there be trouble?  I'm independent of her and of
everybody else--well, maybe not of Jinny.

He said aloud, "What about your drafting at Fliegends'?  I suppose
you want to go study in Paris, and become a famous artist."

"No, I have no real ideas.  I'm just a fair workman, at best.  I'll
never have what they call a 'career.'"

He was so little Feminist as to be pleased.

As they drove up to Miss Hatter's he wound up all the tinsel of his
thoughts in one bright ball and tossed it to her:  "I certainly
have enjoyed this evening!"

She answered with equal poesy, "So have I!"

He tentatively kissed her hand.  She could not have noticed it, for
she said only, "You'll come to our party, week from Thursday,
then?"

"Yes, sweet.  Good night."



10


The surprising objects that you see when you leave your own Grand
Republic and go traveling--pink snakes and polar bears--are nothing
beside what you find when you stay at home and have a new girl and
meet her friends, whose resentment of you is only less than your
amazement that there are such people and that she likes them.

At Tilda Hatter's party, Cass was first uncomfortable because he
was the only Elder Statesman present and the young people showed
their independence by unduly ignoring him.  Then the gods presiding
over that form of torture called social gatherings switched to the
opposite ordeal, and he found himself the rival of another
celebrity, of whom, just to be difficult, the bright young people
did make much.

Besides the boarders, Jinny, Eino, Tracy Oleson, and the efficient
Miss Gunton and Miss Coggs, there were present a couple of
schoolteachers, the leftist county agricultural agent, and a young
Norwegian-American grain expert who had once run for the
Legislature.  They sat tremendously upon the floor and talked, and
all of them, including Jinny, to Cass's delicate distress, had
Bourbon highballs.

Their talk was tempestuous.  They said that America should join
Great Britain in its war against Germany, but that many of the Rich
Guys on Ottawa Heights were Isolationists.  They said that it was
okay--that was how they put it--for a man and a woman to live
together without clerical license.  Cass was shocked when he heard
the pure young novice, Jinny, chirping, "Old people today are just
as afraid of Sex as their grandfathers were."

They all looked at Cass, but forbiddingly did not ask him what he
thought.  Eino Roskinen, squatted beside Jinny, drew her toward
him, and she leaned with her back against his shoulder, and Cass
violently did not notice.

He did not understand their family words and jokes.  One of them
had only to say "Hail the Hippopotamus!" for the whole tribe to
guffaw.  He was not too old for them--he was perhaps eight years
older than Wilma or Tracy--but he felt too bookish, too
responsible, too closely shaved, too alone.

He had become used to his de facto banishment when Lucius and Erica
Fliegend and Sweeney Fishberg came in.

Sweeney Fishberg was perhaps the most remarkable man in the cosmos
of Grand Republic and surrounding terrain.

He was an attorney, of liberal tastes, equally likely to take a
labor-union case for nothing or to take the most fraudulent of
damage suits for a contingent fee which, to the fury of his Yankee
wife, he was likely to give to a fund for strikers--any strikers on
any strike.  He was a saint and a shyster; part Jewish and part
Irish and part German; he had once acted in a summer stock company,
and once taught Greek in a West Virginia college; he was a Roman
Catholic, and a mystic who bothered his priest with metaphysical
questions; he was in open sympathy with the Communist Party.

For twenty years, ever since he had come to Grand Republic from his
natal Massachusetts at the age of thirty, he had been fighting all
that was rich and proud and puffy in the town, and he had never won
a single fight nor lost his joy in any of them, and he was red-
headed and looked like a Cockney comedian.  He was nine years older
than Cass, and no lawyer in the district ever brought such doubtful
suits into court, yet no lawyer was more decorous, more co-
operative with the judge, and Cass believed that Sweeney had thrown
to him all the votes he could influence in Cass's elections as
congressman, judge, and member of the Aurora Borealis Bock Beer and
Literary Association.

It was Sweeney Fishberg who was Cass's rival as celebrity of the
evening and who led the hazing.

Pretending not to know that Cass had even heard of them, Sweeney
and the Fliegends and Tracy Oleson and the county agent agreed that
Dr. Roy Drover was a butcher, that Bradd Criley was a Fascist, and
that the Reverend Dr. Lloyd Garrison Gadd, Cass's distant cousin
and his pastor, was a "phony liberal" who loved the wage-workers
but underpaid his cook.  It was clear to Cass that he was being
drawn, but whenever he wanted to be angry, he remembered that this
was the malice with which Roy and Bradd talked of Sweeney Fishberg
and would have talked of Mr. Fliegend had they ever considered him
important enough to mention.  With prayer and resolution, Cass got
through his hazing, and all of them began to look at him in a fond
and neighborly way--all but Eino.  Not Eino, ever.

On the ground of helping mix the highballs, Cass followed Jinny to
the kitchen, a coop shocking with dirty dishes.  He spoke savagely.
"Did you plan to have all those Robespierres gang up on me?"

"Not really.  And they've often ganged up on me, for what they
think is my innocence."

"Are you in love with that Roskinen?  Now, please, I don't mean to
sound rude, but I must know.  Are you engaged to him or anything?"

"Not anything."

"Are you engaged to anybody?"  His arm circled her shoulder.

"Not just now.  Don't, Cass.  You're choking me."

"I almost could choke you when you let that Roskinen--Oh, I suppose
he's a decent-enough boy, but I'm furious when you let him maul
you, put his hand on your breast."

She flared, as if she hated him, "You have a vile mind!"  But when
he jerked back like a slapped five-year-old, she softened.
"Honestly, darling, it doesn't mean a thing, with a colt like Eino,
but if you want me to act like a lady, I'll try, and how I dread
it!"

He kissed her, long and seriously, surprised by the soft fleshiness
of her lips.  She squeezed away from him with an embarrassed
"Well!" and fled from him, carrying back into the living-room the
still-unwashed glasses she had brought with her.  As Cass leaned
against the untidy sink, overwhelmed, feeling guilty but assuring
himself that she had responded to his kiss, Eino Roskinen came in,
glaring.

"Now this is going to be melodrama," Cass thought protestingly.

Eino was in his uniform as a young radical: dark jacket, soft
shirt, small black bow tie; and he was militant.

"I want to ask you something, sir."

"Need you call me 'sir'?"

"Maybe.  Look.  I'm very fond of Virginia.  I'm kind of her
brother.  I notice you hanging around her, and you don't belong
down here in the slums."

"Slums?"

"I guess they're that to you.  You belong on the Heights.  I want
to know what the idea is.  I guess, aside from your being a judge,
that you could break me in two--you're a sporting gent, I suppose.
But if I found out that you were just having a little fun trying to
make her, I'd take a chance on killing you."

"Eino, that's funny."

"How?"

"Because that's the way I've been thinking about you!  I'm in love
with Jinny.  I want to marry her, if I can.  You're in love with
her, too?"

"And how!  Except when she gets frivolous when I talk about the
principles of co-operative distribution."  Eino sighed.  "But I
can't marry anybody, for years."

"So--"

"Oh, you probably win.  You would!"

"Eino!"  The boy was astonished by Cass's fervor.  "There's nobody
else to whom I can say this.  I worship that girl, and I hope
you'll be my friend as you are hers."

"Okay," said Eino, tragically.

Cass said good-bye to her at one-thirty, in the presence of the
entire underground.  Before going to bed, he spent half an hour in
stroking Cleo and wanting to telephone to Jinny.  But he held off
till next evening and then demanded, Would she take a walk with him
tomorrow evening?

Yes.  Without reservations.

He hoped the Bunch hadn't been too hard on him after he had crawled
away--

"Judge, you never crawled!"

"CASS!"

"Cass."

"Tomorrow at eight?  And a movie afterwards?"

"AND a movie.  And a caramel sundae."

With that telephone conversation, touching on the deeper issues of
life and passion, he felt satisfied.  He was irritated but too
canny to say anything about it when Mrs. Higbee (with the aid of
Cleo) brought him an evening toddy and looked ribald and knowing.

"I can't run this big house all by myself," inwardly complained
Cass, who never yet had run it.



11


Bergheim, Cass's house, the old Eisenherz country place, looked out
over the bluffs.  It had neither a city nor a suburban aspect, but
suggested a comfortable village.  At the back, where the grass was
more like an ancient pasture than a prim lawn, there was a green-
painted wooden well, and the white-painted stable, with its pert
cupola, suggested a print of the 1880's and long gentlemen with
whiskers and driving-gloves, lace ladies with parasols, and spotted
coach-dogs with their tails aloft in that fresher breeze.  But what
to Cass had always been, still was, a last touch of European
elegance in Bergheim was that it had Walnut-colored Venetian
blinds.

Across the street from Cass was the abode of Scott and Juliet Zago,
who had for years been notorious as being happily married.  They
called their house, which displayed fake half-timbering, and wavy
shingles imitating thatch, sometimes "The Playhouse" and sometimes
"The Doll's House," Juliet, you see, being the doll.  She was
thirty-five to Scott's fifty, but she let people think that the gap
was ten years greater.  She was the chronic child-wife; she talked
baby-talk and wriggled and beamed and poked her forefinger at
things; and she often pretended to be the big sister of her two
small daughters.

Scott dealt in insurance, and he made jokes and made puns.  Juliet
read all the books about China and Tibet and gave you her condensed
version of them--not much condensed, at that--with her own system
of pronunciation of Chinese proper names.

Yet Cass, who disliked puns and was readily sickened by baby-talk,
did not detest the Zagos, and theirs was the only house in the
neighborhood to which Cleo ever wandered.  For they were the
kindest of neighbors, as affectionate as parakeets.

On one side of Cass's place lived the Perfect Prutts.

John William Prutt, the father, was a banker; the most first-rate
second-rate banker in the entire state.  He was president of the
Second National Bank.  It could just as well have been called the
First National Bank, since the institution once so named had
perished, but Mr. Prutt's bank would have to be a second, never a
first nor yet a last.  He was fifty years old and always had been.
He was perfect; in everything that was second-class he was perfect.
He was a vestryman, but not the leading vestryman, of St. Anselm's
Church; he had been a vice-president but never the president of the
Federal Club.  He was tall and solemnly handsome, and he never
split an infinitive or a bottle.

His wife, Henrietta Prutt, his son, Jack Prutt, his daughter,
Margaret Prutt, his dog, Dick Prutt, and even his Buick car, the
Buick of the Prutts, were as full of perfection and Pruttery as
John William Prutt himself.

The Prutts lived in a supposedly little white Colonial cottage that
had somehow grown into a huge white Colonial army-barracks, yet
still breathed the purity of Jonathan Edwards, and just beyond it,
in a hulk of grim dark native stone, lived another banker, Norton
Trock, who collected china and sounded like a lady.

On the other side of Cass's house was the blindingly white,
somewhat Spanish and somewhat packing-box, stucco residence of
Gregory Marl, owner of the presumably liberal and Independent
Republican newspapers, the Banner and the Evening Frontier, with
the Sunday Frontier-Banner, the only English-language newspapers in
Grand Republic.  He was a large, quiet, secretly industrious man of
thirty-five; he had inherited the paper but had raised their
circulations; he was a rose-grower and a Bermuda yachtsman.  The
star of his household, and a bright and menacing November star, was
his wife Diantha, who was on every committee in town, and who knew
something and talked a great deal about painting and the drama and
a mystery called Foreign Affairs.  But her major art was as
hostess, and as the Marls had no children, Diantha could spend
weeks in planning a party.  She was the rival of Madge Dedrick as
the general utility duchess and Mrs. Astor of the city.

Madge Dedrick, relict of Sylvanus Dedrick, the lumber baron, lived
a little beyond the Prutts, in a handsome, high-pillared Georgian
house that had exactly the same lines (condensed) as Boone Havock's
and did not in the least look like it.  Madge's half-dozen small
flower-gardens looked like gardens of flowers, while Mr. Havock's
looked like paper posies, the larger size, bought last night and
pinned on crooked in the darkness.

At seventy, Mrs. Dedrick was small and soft-voiced, powdery of
cheek, with tiny plump hands and great powers, held shrewdly under
control, of derision and obscenity.  Now living with her was her
tall, doe-eyed, aloof, divorced daughter, Eve Dedrick Champeris,
who had been reared in Grand Republic, Farmington, New York,
Cannes, and Santa Barbara, and who had divorced the charming Mr.
Raymond Champeris on the good, old-fashioned grounds of drinking
like a sot and passing out at costly parties.  It seemed like such
a waste of champagne, Eve explained.

Diantha Marl tempted society with high intellectual conversation
plus string quartets and dynamite cocktails; Madge and Eve Dedrick
with cool Rhine wines in a low-lit, satin-paneled room filled with
silver and crystal and cushions and exquisite legs and lively
spitefulness, so that the Wargates, who had ten times as much
money, politely accepted the invitations of both Diantha and the
Dedricks.



On all these rulers of Grand Republic Cass meditated, while he
fretted the question of whether Jinny would really like being
lifted from her boarding-house to the stuffy elegance of Ottawa
Heights.  He wanted to persuade himself that she would like Boone
Havock and Eve Champeris better than Eino Roskinen and Sweeney
Fishberg.  It was hard to play Prince to the Cinderella when he
suspected that all the windows in Castle Charming were glued shut.
He conducted extensive imaginary conversations with her, trying to
give both sides, which is likely to be confusing.

"Scott and Juliet--jolly people--wonderful at an outdoor barbecue,"
he heard himself informing Jinny, who snapped back, "Silly pair of
clowns!"

"Gregory and Diantha Marl--leaders in public thought."

"Scared conservatives throwing calico babies to the union wolves!"

"Bradd Criley and Jay Laverick and Frank Brightwing--very amusing
fellows."

"That's something LIKE it.  Just let me meet them, and you keep the
others."

--Now what kind of a mind have I got, to give a nonexistent
antagonist the best of an argument?  As I'm making the whole thing
up anyway, why don't I have Jinny vanquished and humble and
adoring?



If he ever married Jinny, he would have to lure in new dinner-
guests without offending the old ones, and then, probably, Jinny
would not like the novelties.  He thought of a party at which he
introduced the Rev. Dr. Evan Brewster, Negro pastor of an unpainted
Baptist church in the North End, and Ph.D. of Columbia, to Dr.
Drover and Eve Champeris, and how bored Dr. Brewster would be by
their patter and how much danger there would be that Jinny would
too openly agree.

Then, "Oh dry up!" said Cass to his imagination.

When the spring term of court was over, he was free for all summer,
except for special sessions and a few days in the outlying towns of
the district.  They wound up with a solemn meeting of Judges
Blackstaff, Flaaten, and Timberlane _in re_ the portentous
question: should the judges of this district, when on the bench,
wear silk robes, as in Minneapolis?

The three dignitaries sat about the long oak table in Judge
Blackstaff's chambers, smoking unaccustomed cigars, the gift of
their host, and grew red-faced with the ardor of their debate.

"It's a matter of dignity," maintained Judge Blackstaff, looking
more than usual like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.  "I don't hold
with these English wigs and heavy robes, but I do think we have to
show the public, which is so irreverent and flippant today, all
jazz and comic strips, that we represent the sanctity of Justice."

"Dignity, hell!" Judge Flaaten protested.  "Every time some Norske
or Svenske saw me in a black-silk nightshirt, it would cost me ten
votes.  Besides, robes are hot."

Judge Timberlane put in, "Not very, Conrad.  They can be quite
light.  Besides, Grand Republic is the coolest city in the state
south of Duluth.  Besides, do you want to have the boys on the
bench in Minneapolis go on laughing at us as a bunch of farmer
j.p.'s?"

"I don't care a damn what they laugh at as long as the voting
Lut'erans like us," insisted Judge Flaaten.  He glared at Judge
Blackstaff.  "Steve, this is a serious matter.  Are we going to
yield up the high principles of common democracy to the bawds--uh--
the gauds of the outworn Old World?"

"Hurray!" breathed Judge Timberlane.

"Cass, can't you be serious?" worried Judge Blackstaff.  "This is a
special court of protocol, which may go far to determine the
standing of the judiciary in Grand Republic for all time to come.
Write your votes on the yellow pads, boys, and fold 'em--and give
me back those pencils when you get done with 'em.  It's a caution
the way my pencils get stolen!"

Silk robes for district judges won by two to one, and when autumn
came, none of them more proudly showed his robe to his relatives
than Judge Flaaten.  Judge Timberlane did not care so much.  There
was only one person for whom he wanted to wear his robe, and by
prodigious chicanery he lured her into the court to see it.  But--
such is life--she only laughed.



12


The select golf-and-tennis association of Grand Republic was the
Heather Club, three miles from the business center, on a peninsula
reaching out from the south shore of Dead Squaw Lake.  Surrounding
it was the smart new real-estate development called the Country
Club District, habitat of such gilded young married couples as the
Harley Bozards, the Don Pennlosses, the Beecher Filligans, and the
playground of Jay Laverick, the town's principal professional Gay
Bachelor, who happened to be a widower.  The houses were Spanish,
like Hollywood, or French, like Great Neck, and the Heather club-
house was a memory of Venice, with balconies, iron railings, and a
canal thirty-six feet long.

To the Heather Club in late June Cass came for one of the famous
Saturday Evening Keno Games.  Keno (a sport beloved by the more
aged and pious Irishwomen also) consists in placing a bean upon a
number called out by some swindler unknown, through an unseen loud-
speaker, and after you have breathlessly placed enough beans upon
enough numbers, you fail to get the prize.  It is not so
intellectual as chess or skipping the rope, but it is a favorite
among Grand Republic's leading citizens, who gather at the Heather
Club on every Saturday evening in summer, to drink cocktails and
play keno and then drink a lot more.

With only one cocktail in him, Cass was deaf to the joys of keno
this evening, and he wished that he were deaf to the crackling
voices about him at the dozen long tables, as he somberly put down
his beans.  Roy Drover's shouts of "Send us a thirty-two, baby,
send us a thirty-two, come on, baby, come on, hand us a thirty-two"
merely rivaled Queenie Havock's parrot shrieks and Norton Trock's
high giggling, while Eve Champeris had a flushed mild imbecility
about her lily face.  Delia Lent, a purposeful lady though rich,
sat beside Cass, babbling about trout-fishing, but presently he
could hear nothing that she said.  All the hundred voices were
woven into a blanket of sound that covered Cass and choked him.

Abruptly, while Mrs. Lent stared at his lack of manners, Cass
bolted from the table, charged toward the bar.  He would have to
have a quantity of drinks, if he was going to survive these
pleasures.  He passed an alcove in which two grim women, too
purposeful about gambling to waste time on keno, were hour after
hour yanking the handles of twenty-five-cent slot machines.  He
passed a deep chair in which sat two married people--not married to
each other.  He looked into the card room where Boone Havock, Mayor
Stopple, Judge Flaaten, Counselor Oliver Beehouse, and Alfred
Limbaugh, the hardware king, were playing tough poker in a refined
way.

Jinny's spirit walked with him derisively.

He had almost reached the forgetfulness to be found at the bar when
beyond it, in the Ladies' Lounge, he saw Chris Grau, having a
liqueur with Lillian Drover.  He stopped, in cold guiltiness, and
the imaginary Jinny fled.

He had not seen Chris for ten days, and as she looked at him, all
her kindness in her good brown eyes, he shivered.  But he
obediently chain-ganged into the lounge.  Lillian Drover rose,
tittering, in washed-out imitation of her husband's humor, "I guess
I better leave you two young lovers alone, if I know what's good
for me."

Chris's smile indicated that that would be fine.

The Ladies' Lounge, which had been named that by Diantha Marl,
after having been christened the Rubens Room by the Milwaukee
architect-decorator who had done the club in the finest Moorish
style known in his city, was a harem, with grilled windows, a
turquoise-blue tiled floor, and a resigned fountain.  It was
suitable to the harem feeling that Chris should be wearing a loose-
throated lilac dress.

Cass sat facing her, with an entirely mechanical "Can I get you
another drink?"

"Not for me.  There's too much drinking here.  I'm glad you're so
sober.  But then, you always are.  It's these younger people that
are breaking down the bulwarks of society with their guzzling and
shrieking and indecent dancing."

"Now, now, Chris, the drunkest person here tonight is Queenie
Havock, and she's well over fifty, and I saw Bernice Claywheel, and
she must be over forty, out dancing on the terrace with Jay
Laverick as though she expected to eat him."

"Ye-es I know, but--You simply love the sweet young things, don't
you, Cassy--Cass."

"M?"

"I'm sure you had a wonderful time with your beautiful unknown at
the Unstable, two weeks ago!"

"Why, I--Yes I did!"

"And did you enjoy holding hands in the moonlight?"

He tried to be jaunty.  "Enjoyed it very much.  Especially as I
don't suppose I'll have another chance, alas!"

--Why don't you tell Chris to go to the devil?  She's not your
guardian.

"So you don't think you'll see her again, eh, Cass darling.
Honestly, now--honestLEE--you know I'm not the nagging sort of girl
that would even ask who she was, and certainly I'm not the kind
that would go around hinting and whispering that a man who isn't so
young any more--"

"What do you--"

"--is making a fool of himself over some young tramp.  I was just
teasing you about this girl.  Of course I KNOW you'd never fall for
her, whoever she is.  So let's not say anything more about it,
dear."

"I hadn't said anything at all!"

"That's what I say.  Honestly, I was just joking.  Now tell me:
will you get the Fleeber-Biskness case in the fall, or will they
settle it?"

Now the affaire Fleeber-Biskness was a fascinating controversy, to
Judge Timberlane, but it had not seemed so to the crass public.  It
was a conversion case, dealing with the possession of a warehouse
28' 7" X 62' 8".  Cass was glad once more to see what a sympathetic
brain Chris had and, as he looked at them again, what sleek legs.
As the palace of pleasure rang with the bacchanalia of keno, he
explained to this willing hearer the low tricks Mr. Biskness was
accused of having played with a carload of clay.  He stumbled as
she crossed her legs and he realized that, with innocent spinster
boldness, she had come without stockings.

This was in the prim pre-war era of 1941, when it is true that
bathing-suits had been reduced to an emphasized nudity, but when
perfect ladies still did not display naked legs in public rooms.
The Judge was a person of decorum and modesty, but he was
interested.

--Chris would give a lover such solid affection--probably much more
than a filly like Jinny Marshland.

Not unmindful of the careless lilac-colored skirt but determined to
be high-minded, he went on with the case, winding up, "You
understand, that's only Fleeber's version, and it's a matter of
record.  I'm not giving away any secrets."

"Sure.  I know you never tell tales out of court," said Chris,
fondly.

"If I ever did, you'd be the one person I could rely on.  What's
say we have a drink?"

"I'd love to," gurgled the strange woman in lilac.



An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives


THE ZEBRA SISTERS


The Quimber Girls, better known to the ribald of Grand Republic as
the Zebra Sisters, belonged to a real family, lively and devoted,
full of anecdotes that began with laughter and, "Oh, do you
remember the time when."  Their father, Millard Quimber, who was
still alive, aged eighty-one, was the city superintendent of
schools from 1895 to 1928.  He was referred to in the press as "one
of our greatest builders," because during his reign there had been
erected three red-brick school-buildings which looked like red-
brick school-buildings.  He was also known as a "profound scholar,"
because he continually quoted Bobby Burns and Henry Van Dyke and
the first two lines of the Iliad, almost in the original Greek.

His three daughters were named Zoe, Zora, and Zeta; they were born
between 1890 and 1900; they were fine, big, bouncing hussars of
women, hearty at winter sports, discursive about their husbands,
all philoprogenitive, all ardent Presbyterians, though with secret
desires to be Episcopalians and chic.  Their favorite words were
family, chickabiddies, earnest, expensive, womanly, jolly, and ice
cream.

Their several husbands were derisively referred to at the Heather
Club bar as the Brothers-in-Law, Incorporated.

Zoe, the youngest daughter, was married to Harold W. Whittick, the
owner of radio station KICH and of Whittick & Bruntz, a two-room
advertising agency which existed chiefly to tell a house-hungry
world about Wargate Wood Products.  When the chairman of a Rotary
Club luncheon at which Harold W. was to speak (about Progress)
asked him what to say in introduction, Harold W. wrote a
description of himself which may stand as modest and accurate:

"Not only the most streamlined but the most up-to-the-second
moderne citizen of Grand Republic."

But Harold W. was, as the chairman laughingly said--you know,
kidding him--not himself in Rotary, because he was National
Assistant Treasurer of the rival Streamlineup Club, a service
organization distinctive in that it had all the speeches BEFORE
lunch, when everybody was "still on his toes, full of ginger and
not of hash."

Zora, the middle Zebra, was fondly wed to Duncan Browler, first
vice president of the Wargate Corporation, in charge of
manufacture.  Unlike Harold W. Whittick, he did not make speeches.

The oldest, Zeta, was married to Alfred T. Umbaugh, a gentle and
predatory soul who admired his brother-in-law Harold and who, more
nearly than the other two husbands, endured the demands of his wife
that he be jolly and amorous.  He was the chief owner of the Button
Bright Chain of Hardware Stores, twenty-seven of them, all shiny
and yellow, scattered through Minnesota and the Dakotas, with one
far-flung outpost or consulate in Montana.  This imperial standing
made him, like Browler, eligible to the Federal and Heather Clubs.
Naturally, Whittick had also been admitted to those twin heavens,
but with a warning from the committee that he would do well not to
get oratorical and forward-looking after his fourth highball, and
while he was at the table of the blest, he was about ten feet below
the salt.

Harold, Duncan and Alfred were unlike in tempo, but they were all
true husbands to the Zebra.  All three of them were irritated by
their wives but never thought of quitting them, all of them had
sons and daughters, all were devoted to golf, fishing, musical-
comedy movies, motor boats, and Florida, and all of them had new
houses, in the Country Club District, of which they were fiercely
proud and for which they would have done murder.  None of them was
eccentric, except that Harold W. Whittick--just for a josh,
everybody said; to show off and try to be different--asserted that
he had once voted for a Democratic candidate for the presidency,
Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  And all of them, though grumblingly,
consented to be ruled and extensively discussed by The Family.

They all dined with Grampa Quimber every Sunday noon; and each
Thursday, one of the three sisters was hostess to the others and
their broods, with the one great-grandchild in The Family, that of
the Umbaughs, asleep upstairs.  At these feasts, Harold W. Whittick
usually told the story about the Irishman and the cigar-counter
girl; and there was a good deal of innocent laughter about the