Ten days after the failure of the bank in Libya Hill, Randy Shepperton arrived in New York. He had made up his mind suddenly, without letting George know, and the motives that brought him were mixed. For one thing, he wanted to talk to George and see if he couldn’t help to get him straightened out. His letters had been so desperate that Randy was beginning to be worried about him. Then, too, Randy felt he just had to get away from Libya Hill for a few days and out of that atmosphere of doom and ruin and death. And he was free now, there was nothing to keep him from coming, so he came.

He arrived early in the morning, a little after eight o’clock, and took a taxi from the station to the address on Twelfth Street and rang the bell. After a long interval and another ringing of the bell, the door lock clicked and he entered the dim-lit hall. The stairs were dark and the whole house seemed sunk in sleep. His footfalls rang out upon the silence. The air had a close, dead smell compounded of many elements, among which he could distinguish the dusty emanations of old wood and worn plankings and the ghostly reminders of many meals long since eaten. The light was out on the second-floor landing and the gloom was Stygian, so he groped along the wall until he found the door and rapped loudly with his knuckles.

In a moment the door was almost jerked off its hinges, and George, his hair dishevelled, his eyes red with sleep, an old bathrobe flung hastily over his pyjamas, stood framed in the opening, blinking out into the darkness. Randy was a little taken back by the change in his appearance in the six months since he had last seen him. His face, which had always had a youthful and even childish quality, had grown older and sterner. The lines had deepened. And now his heavy lip stuck out at his caller with a menacing challenge, and his whole pug-nosed countenance had a bulldog look of grim truculence.

When Randy recovered from his first surprise he cried out heartily:

“Now wait a minute! Wait a minute! Don’t shoot! I’m not that fellow at all!”

At the unexpected sound of the familiar voice George looked startled, then his face broke into a broad smile of incredulity and delight. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he cried, and with that he seized hold of Randy, wrung him vigorously by the hand, almost dragged him into the room, and then held him off at arm’s length while he grinned his pleasure and amazement.

“That’s better,” said Randy in a tone of mock relief. “I was afraid it might be permanent.”

They now clapped each other on the back and exchanged those boisterous and half-insulting epithets with which two men who have been old friends like to greet each other when they meet. Then, almost at once, George asked Randy eagerly about the bank. Randy told him. George listened intently to the shocking details of the catastrophe. It was even worse than he had supposed, and he kept firing questions at Randy. At last Randy said:

“Well, that’s just about the whole story. I’ve told you all I know. But come, we can talk about that later. What I want to know is — how the hell are you? You’re not cracking up, too, are you? Your last letters made me a little uneasy about you.”

In their joy at seeing one another again and their eagerness to talk, they had both remained standing by the door. But now, as Randy put his casual finger on George’s sore spot, George winced and began to pace back and forth in an agitated way without answering.

Randy saw that he looked tired. His eyes were bloodshot, as if he had not slept well, and his unshaved face made him look haggard. The old bathrobe he was wearing had all the buttons missing, and the corded rope that belonged to it was also gone and George had lashed a frayed necktie round the middle to hold the thing together. This remarkable garment added to his general appearance of weariness and exhaustion. His features as he strode about the room had the contracted intensity of nervous strain, and as he looked up quickly Randy saw the worry and apprehension in his eyes.

Suddenly he paused and faced Randy squarely, and with a grim set to his jaws said:

“All right, let me have it! What are they saying now?”

“Who? What is who saying?”

“The people back home. That’s what you meant, isn’t it? From what they’ve written me and said to my face, I can imagine what they’re saying behind my back. Let’s have it and get it over with. What are they saying now?”

“Why,” said Randy, “I don’t know that they’re saying anything. Oh, they said plenty at first — just the kind of thing they wrote you. But since the bank failed I don’t think I’ve heard your name mentioned. They’ve got too much real trouble to worry about now.”

George looked incredulous, and then relieved. For a moment he studied the floor and said nothing. But as his sense of relief spread its soothing balm upon his agitated spirit he looked up and smiled broadly at his friend, and then, realising for the first time that Randy was standing there with his back against the door, he suddenly remembered his duties as a host and burst out impulsively and warmly:

“God, Randy, I’m glad to see you! I can’t get over it! Sit down. Sit down! Can’t you find a chair somewhere? For Christ’s sake, where are all the chairs in this dump?”

With that he went over to a chair that was piled high with manuscript and books, brushed these things off unceremoniously on to the floor, and shoved the chair across the room towards his friend.

He apologised now for the coldness of the place, explaining unnecessarily that the door-bell had got him out of bed, and telling Randy to keep his overcoat on and that it would be warmer in a little while. Then he vanished through a doorway into a noisome cubby-hole, turned on a faucet, and came back with a coffee-pot full of water. This he proceeded to pour into the spout of the radiator that stood below a window. When this was done, he got down on his hands and knees, peered about underneath, struck a match, turned some sort of valve, and applied the flame. There was an immediate blast, and pretty soon the water began to rattle and gurgle in the pipes.

“It’s gas,” he said, as he clambered to his feet. “That’s the worst thing about this place — it gives me headaches when I have to spend long hours working here.”

While this operation had been going on, Randy took a look round. The room, which was really two large rooms thrown together when the sliding-doors that joined them were pushed into the wall, as now, seemed as big as a barn. The windows at the front gave on to the street, and those at the rear looked out over some bleak little squares of backyard fences to another row of buildings. The first impression Randy got was one of staleness: the whole apartment had that unmistakable look and feeling of a place where someone has lived and where something has been finished so utterly that there is no going back to it. It was not merely the disorder everywhere — the books strewn around, the immense piles of manuscript, the haphazard scattering of stray socks, shirts and collars, old shoes, and unpressed trousers inside out. It was not even the dirty cup and saucer filled with old cigarette-butts, all of them stained with rancid coffee, which was set down in the vast and untidy litter of the table. It was just that life had gone out of all these things — they were finished — all as cold and tired and stale as the old dirty cup and the exhausted butts.

George was living in the midst of this dreary waste with a kind of exasperated and unhappy transciency. Randy saw that he had caught him on the wing, in that limbo of waiting between work which is one of the most tormenting periods a writer can know. He was through with one thing, and yet not really ready to settle down in earnest to another. He was in a state of furious but exhausted ferment. But it was not merely that he was going through a period of gestation before going on with his next book. Randy realised that the reception of his first, the savagery of the attack against him in Libya Hill, the knowledge that he had done something more than write a book — that he had also torn up violently by the roots all those ties of friendship and sentiment that bind a man to home — all of this, Randy felt, had so bewildered and overwhelmed him that now he was caught up in the maelstrom of the conflict which he had himself produced. He was not ready to do another piece of work because his energies were still being absorbed and used up by the repercussions of the first.

Moreover, as Randy looked round the room and his eye took in the various objects that contributed to its incredible chaos, he saw, in a dusty corner, a small green smock or apron, wrinkled as though it had been thrown aside with a gesture of weary finality, and beside it, half-folded inwards, a single small and rather muddy overshoe. The layer of dust upon them showed that they had lain there for months. These were the only poignant ghosts, and Randy knew that something which had been there in that room had gone out of it for ever — that George was done with it.

Randy saw how it was with George, and felt that almost any decisive act would be good for him. So now he said:

“For God’s sake, George, why don’t you pack up and clear out of all this? You’re through with it — it’s finished — it’ll only take you a day or two to wind the whole thing up. So pull yourself together and get out. Move away somewhere — anywhere — just to enjoy the luxury of waking up in the morning and finding none of this round you.”

“I know,” said George, going over to a sagging couch and tossing back the pile of foul-looking bedclothes that covered it and flinging himself down wearily. “I’ve thought of it,” he said.

Randy did not press the point. He knew it would be no use. George would have to work round to it in his own way and in his own good time.

George shaved and dressed, and they went out for breakfast. Then they returned and talked all morning, and were finally interrupted by the ringing of the telephone.

George answered it. Randy could tell by the sounds which came from the transmitter that the caller was female, garrulous, and unmistakably Southern. George did nothing for a while but blurt out polite banalities:

“Well now, that’s fine . . . I certainly do appreciate it . . . That’s mighty nice of you . . . Well now, I’m certainly glad you called. I hope you will remember me to all of them.” Then he was silent, listening intently, and Randy gathered from the contraction of his face that the conversation had now reached another stage. In a moment he said slowly, in a somewhat puzzled tone: “Oh, he is? . . . He did? . . . Well”— somewhat indefinitely —“that’s mighty nice of him . . . Yes, I’ll remember . . . Thank you very much . . . Good-bye.”

He hung up the receiver and grinned wearily.

“That,” he said, “was one of the I-just-called-you-up-to-tell-you-that-I’ve-read-it-all-every-word-of-it-and-I-think-it’s-perfectly-grand people — another lady from the South.” As he went on his voice unconsciously dropped into burlesque as he tried to imitate the unction of a certain type of Southern female whose words drip molasses mixed with venom:

“‘Why, I’ll declayah, we’re all just so proud of yew-w! I’m just simply thrilled to daith! It’s the most wondaful thing I evah read! Why it is! Why, I nevah dreamed that anyone could have such a wondaful command of lang-widge!’”

“But don’t you like it just a little?” asked Randy. “Even if it’s laid on with a trowel, you must get some satisfaction from it.”

“God!” George said wearily, and came back and fell upon the couch. “If you only knew! That’s only one out of a thousand! That telephone there”— he jerked a thumb towards it —“has played a tune for months now! I know them all — I’ve got ’em classified! I can tell by the tone of the voice the moment they speak whether it’s going to be type B or group X.”

“So the author is already growing jaded? He’s already bored with his first taste of fame?”

“Fame?”— disgustedly. “That’s not fame — that’s just plain damn rag-picking!”

“Then you don’t think the woman was sincere?”

“Yes”— his face and tone were bitter now —“she had all the sincerity of a carrion crow. She’ll go back and tell them that she talked to me, and by the time she’s finished with me she’ll have a story that every old hag in town can lick her chops and cackle over for the next six months.”

It sounded so unreasonable and unjust that Randy spoke up quickly:

“Don’t you think you’re being unfair?”

George’s head was down dejectedly and he did not even look up; with his hands plunged in his trouser pockets he just snorted something unintelligible but scornful beneath his breath.

It annoyed and disappointed Randy to see him acting so much like a spoiled brat, so he said:

“Look here! It’s about time you grew up and learned some sense It seems to me you’re being pretty arrogant. Do you think you can afford to be? I doubt if you or any man can go through life successfully playing the spoiled genius.”

Again he muttered something in a sullen tone.

“Maybe that woman was a fool,” Randy went on. “Well, a lot of people are. And maybe she hasn’t got sense enough to understand what you wrote in the way you think it should be understood. But what of it? She gave the best she had. It seems to me that instead of sneering at her now, you could be grateful.”

George raised his head: “You heard the conversation, then?”

“No, only what you told me.”

“All right, then — you didn’t get the whole story. I wouldn’t mind if she’d just called up to gush about the book, but, look here!”— he leaned towards Randy very earnestly and tapped him on the knee. “I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m just a conceited fool. I’ve lived through and found out about something these last few months that most people never have the chance to know. I give you my solemn word for it, that woman didn’t call up because she liked my book and wanted to tell me so. She called up,” he cried bitterly, “to pry round, and to find out what she could about me, and to pick my bones.”

“Oh, look here now —” Randy began impatiently.

“Yes, she did, too! I know what I’m talking about!” he said earnestly. “Here’s what you didn’t hear — here’s what she was working round to all the time — it came out at the end. I don’t know who she is, I never heard of her before — but she’s a friend of Ted Reeve’s wife. And apparently he thinks I put him in the book, and has been making threats that he’s going to kill me if I ever go back home.”

This was true; Randy had heard it in Libya Hill.

“That’s what it was about,” George sneered bitterly —“that woman’s call. That’s what most of the calls are about. They want to talk to the Beast of the Apocalypse, feel him out, and tell him: ‘Ted’s all right! Now don’t you believe all those things, you hear! He was upset at first — but he sees the whole thing now, the way you meant it — and everything’s all right.’ That’s what she said to me, so maybe I’m not the fool you think I am!”

He was so earnest and excited that for a moment Randy did not answer him. Besides, making allowances for the distortion of his feelings, he could see some justice in what George said.

“Have you had many calls like that?” Randy asked.

“Oh”— wearily —“almost every day. I think everyone who has been up here from home since the book was published has telephoned me. They go about it in different ways. There are those who call me up as if I were some kind of ghoul: ‘How are you?’— in a small, quiet tone such as you might use to a condemned man just before they lead him to the death chamber at Sing Sing —‘Are you all right?’ And then you get alarmed, you begin to stammer and to stumble round, ‘Why, yes? Yes, I’m fine! Fine, thanks!’— meanwhile, beginning to feel yourself all over just to see if you’re all there. And then they say in that same still voice: ‘Well, I just wanted to know . . . I just called up to find out . . . I hope you’re all right.’”

After looking at Randy for a moment in a tormented and bewildered way, he burst out in an exasperated laugh:

“It’s been enough to give a hippopotamus the creeps! To listen to them talk, you’d think I was Jack the Ripper! Even those who call up to laugh and joke about it take the attitude that the only reason I wrote the book was to see how much dirt and filth I could dig up on people I didn’t like. Yes!” he cried bitterly. “My greatest supporters at home seem to be the disappointed little soda-jerkers who never made a go of it and the frustrated hangers-on who never got into the Country Club. ‘You sure did give it to that son-of-a-bitch, Jim So-and-so!’ they call me up to tell me. ‘You sure did burn him up! I had to laugh when I read what you said about him — boy!’ Or: ‘Why didn’t you say something about that bastard, Charlie What’s-his-name? I’d have given anything to see you take him for a ride!’ . . . Jesus God!” He struck his fist upon his knee with furious exasperation. “That’s all it means to them: nothing but nasty gossip, slander, malice, envy, a chance of getting back at someone — you’d think that none of them had ever read a book before. Tell me,” he said earnestly, bending towards Randy, “isn’t there anyone there — anyone besides yourself — who gives a damn about the book itself? Isn’t there anyone who has read it as a book, who sees what it was about, who understands what I was trying to do?”

His eyes were full of torment now. It was out at last — the thing Randy had dreaded and wanted to avoid. He said:

“I should think you’d know more about that by this time than anyone. After all, you’ve had more opportunity than anyone else to find out.”

Well, that was out, too. It was the answer that he had to have, that he had feared to get. He stared at Randy for a minute or two with his tormented eyes, then he laughed bitterly and began to rave:

“Well, then, to hell with it! To hell with all of it!” He began to curse violently. “The small two-timing bunch of crooked sons-ofbitches! They can go straight to hell! They’ve done their best to ruin me!”

It was ignoble and unworthy and untrue. Randy saw that he was lashing himself into a fit of violent recrimination in which all that was worst and weakest m him was coming out — distortion, prejudice, and self-pity. These were the things he would have to conquer somehow or belost. Randy stopped him curtly:

“Now, no more of that! For God’s sake, George, pull yourself together! If a lot of damn fools read your book and didn’t understand it, that’s not Libya Hill, that’s the whole world. People there are no different from people anywhere. They thought you wrote about them — and the truth is, you did. So they got mad at you. You hurt their feelings, and you touched their pride. And, to be blunt about it, you opened up a lot of old wounds. There were places where you rubbed salt in. In saying this, I’m not like those others you complain about: you know damn wel! I understand what you did and why you had to do it. But just the same, there were some things that you did not have to do — and you’d have had a better book if you hadn’t done them. So don’t whine about it now. And don’t think you’re a martyr.”

But he had got himself primed into a mood of martyrdom. As Randy looked at him sitting there, one hand gripping his knee, his face sullen, his head brooding down between his hulking shoulders, he could see how this mood had grown upon him. To begin with, he had been naive not to realise how people would feel about some of the things he had written. Then, when the first accusing letters came, he had been overwhelmed and filled with shame and humility and guilt over the pain he had caused. But as time went on and the accusations became more vicious and envenomed, he had wanted to strike back and defend himself. When he saw there was no way to do that — when people answered his explanatory letters only with new threats and insults — he had grown bitter. And finally, after taking it all so hard and torturing himself through the whole gamut of emotions, he had sunk into this morass of self-pity.

George began to talk now about “the artist”, spouting all the intellectual and aesthetic small change of the period. The artist, it seemed, was a kind of fabulous, rare, and special creature who lived on “beauty” and “truth” and had thoughts so subtle that the average man could comprehend them no more than a mongrel could understand the moon he bayed at. The artist, therefore, could achieve his “art” only through a constant state of flight into some magic wood, some province of enchantment.

The phrases were so spurious that Randy felt like shaking him. And what annoyed him most was the knowledge that George was really so much better than this. He must know how cheap and false what he was saying really was. At last Randy said to him quietly:

“George, of all the people I have ever known, you are the least qualified to play the wounded faun.”

But he was so immersed in his fantasy that he paid no attention. He just said: “Huh?”— and then was off again. Anybody who was “a real artist,” he said, was doomed to be an outcast from society. His inevitable fate was to be “driven out by the tribe.”

It was all so wrong that Randy lost patience with him:

“For Christ’s sake, George, what’s the matter with you? You’re talking like a fool!” he said. “You haven’t been driven out of anywhere! You’ve only got yourself in a little hot water at home! Here you’ve been ranting your head off about ‘beauty’ and ‘truth’! God! Why in hell, then, don’t you stop lying to yourself? Can’t you see? The truth is that for the first time in your life you’ve managed to get a foothold in the thing you want to do. Your book got some good notices and has had a fair sale. You’re in the right spot now to go on. So where have you been driven? No doubt all those threatening letters have made you feel like an exile from home, but hell, man! — you’ve been an exile for years. And of your own accord, too! You know you’ve had no intention of ever going back there to live. But just as soon as they started yelling for your scalp, you fooled yourself into believing you’d been driven out by force! And, as for this idea of yours that a man achieves ‘beauty’ by escaping somewhere from the life he knows, isn’t the truth just the opposite? Haven’t you written me the same thing yourself a dozen times?”

“How do you mean?” he said sullenly.

“I mean, taking your own book as an example, isn’t it true that every good thing in it came, not because you withdrew from life, but because you got into it — because you managed to understand and use the life you knew?”

He was silent now. His face, which had been screwed up into a morose scowl, gradually began to relax and soften, and at last he looked up with a little crooked smile.

“I don’t know what comes over me sometimes,” he said. He shook his head and looked ashamed of himself and laughed. “You’re right, of course,” he went on seriously. “What you say is true. And that’s the way it has to be, too. A man must use what he knows — he can’t use what he doesn’t know . . . And that’s why some of the critics make me mad,” he added bluntly.

“How’s that?” asked Randy, glad to hear him talking sense at last. “Oh, you know,” he said, “you’ve seen the reviews. Some of them said the book was ‘too autobiographical’.”

This was surprising. And Randy, with the outraged howls of Libya Hill still ringing in his ears, and with George’s outlandish rantings in answer to those howls still echoing in the room, could hardly believe he had heard him aright. He could only say in frank astonishment:

“Well, it was autobiographical — you can’t deny it.”

“But not ‘too autobiographical’,” George went on earnestly. “If the critics had just crossed those words out and written in their place ‘not autobiographical enough’, they’d have hit it squarely. That’s where I failed. That’s where the real fault was.” There was no question that he meant it, for his face was twisted suddenly with a grimace, the scar of his defeat and shame. “My young hero was a stick, a fool, a prig, a snob, as Dedalus was — as in my own presentment of the book I was. There was the weakness. Oh, I know — there were lots of auto............