Chapter IV: Part 4

Yet Clarissa’s including me among the little Hamlets was irritating, and when I joined in the discussion again I was careful to give her no satisfaction; it would have been a partial victory for her if I had denied my generic similarity to my own contemporaries.

Paul spoke of practical matters, explaining to us the way he intended to operate in the coming months; and I was given a glimpse of the organization which had spontaneously come into being only a few weeks before.

“Hope we can have lunch tomorrow, Gene. I’ll give you a better picture then, the overall picture: and your part in it. Briefly, for now, the organization has been set up as a company under California law with Cave as president and myself, Iris and Clarissa as directors. I’m also secretary-treasurer but only for now. We’re going to need a first-rate financial man to head our campaign fund and I’m working on several possibilities right now.”

“What’s the ... company called?” I asked.

“Cavites, Inc. We didn’t want to call it anything but that’s the law here and since we intended to raise money we had to have a legal setup.”

“Got a nice sound, ah, Cavite,” said Hastings, nodding.

“What on earth should we have done if he’d had _your_ name, Paul?” exclaimed Clarissa, to the indignation of both Hastings and Paul. They shut her up quickly.

Paul went on in his smooth deep voice, “I’ve had a lot of experience, of course, but this is something completely new for me, a real challenge and one which I’m glad to meet head-on.”

“How did you get into it?” I asked.

Paul pointed dramatically to Hastings. “Him! He took me to a meeting in Laguna last year. I was sold the first time. _I got the message._”

There was a hush as we were allowed to contemplate this awesome information. Then, smiling in a fashion which he doubtless would have called “wry,” the publicist continued: “I knew this was it. I contacted Cave immediately and found we talked the same language. He was all for the idea and so we incorporated. He said he wasn’t interested in the organizational end and left that to us with Iris sort of representing him, though of course we all do since we’re all Cavites. This thing is big and we’re part of it.” He almost smacked his lips. I listened, fascinated. “Anyway he’s going to do the preaching part and we’re going to handle the sales end, if you get what I mean. We’re selling something which nobody else ever sold before and you know what that is?” He paused dramatically and we stared at him, a little stupidly. “Truth!” His voice was triumphant. “We’re selling the truth about life and that’s something that nobody, but nobody, has got.”

Clarissa broke the silence which had absorbed his last words. “You’re simply out of this world, Paul! If I hadn’t heard you, I’d never have believed it. But you don’t have to sell _us_, dear; we’re in on it too. Besides, I have to catch a plane.” She looked at her watch. She stood up and we did too. She thanked Hastings for lunch and then, before she left the patio on his arm, she said: “Now you boys get on together and remember what I’ve told you. Gene must be used, and right away. Get him to write something dignified, for a magazine.” We murmured assent. Clarissa said good-by and left the patio with Hastings. Her voice, shrill and hard, could be heard even after she left. “The truth about life! Oh, it’s going to be priceless!”

I looked quickly at Paul to see if he had heard but, if he had, he didn’t betray the fact. He was looking at me intently, speculatively. “I think we’re going to get along fine, Gene, just fine.” Leaving me only a fumbled word or two of polite corroboration with which to express my sincere antipathy; then we went our separate ways.

3

I met Paul the next day at his office for a drink and not for lunch since, at the last minute, his secretary called me to say he was tied up and could I possibly come at five. I said that I could. I did.

His offices occupied an entire floor of a small sky-scraper on the edge of Beverly Hills. I was shown through a series of rooms done in natural wood and beige with indirect lighting and the soft sound of Strauss waltzes piped in from all directions: the employees responded best to three-four time according to the current efficiency reports.

Beneath an expensive but standard mobile, Paul stood, waiting for me in his office. His desk, a tiny affair of white marble on slender iron legs had been rolled off to one side and the office gave, as had been intended, the impression of being a small drawing room rather than a place of intense business. I was greeted warmly. My hand was shaken firmly. My eyes were met squarely for the regulation-length of time. Then we sat down on a couch which was like the open furry mouth of some great soft beast and his secretary rolled a portable bar toward us.

“Name your poison,” said the publicist genially. We agreed on a cocktail which he mixed with the usual comments one expects from a regular fellow.

Lulled by the alcohol, by the room, disarmed by the familiar patter in which one made all the correct responses, our conversation as ritualistic as that of a French dinner party, I was not prepared for the abrupt: “You don’t like me, do you, Gene?”

Only once or twice before had anyone ever said this to me and each time that it happened I had vowed grimly that the _next_ time, no matter where or with whom, I should answer with perfect candor, with merciless accuracy: “No, I don’t.” But since I am neither quick nor courageous, I murmured a pale denial.

“It’s all right, Gene. I know how you probably feel.” And the monster was magnanimous; he treated me with pity. “We’ve got two different points of view. That’s all. I have to make my way in this rat-race and you don’t. You don’t have to do anything, so you can afford to patronize us poor hustlers.”

“Patronize isn’t quite the word.” I was beginning to recover from the first shock. A crushing phrase or two occurred to me but the publicist knew his business and he changed course before I could begin my work of demolition.

“Well, I just wanted you to know that there are no hard feelings. In my business you get used to this sort of thing: occupational hazard, you might say. I’ve had to fight my way every inch and I know that a lot of people are going to be jostled in the process, which is just too bad for them.” He smiled suddenly, drawing the sting. “But I have a hunch we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other so we ought to start on a perfectly plain basis of understanding. You’re on to me and I’m on to you.” The man was diabolic in the way he could enrage yet not allow his adversary sufficient grounds for even a perfunctory defense. He moved rapidly, with a show of spurious reason which quite dazzled me. His was what, presently, he called “the common-sense view.”

I told him I had no objection to working with him; that everything I had heard about him impressed me; that he was wrong to suspect me of disdaining methods whose efficacy was so well-known. I perjured myself for several impassioned minutes and, on a rising note of coziness, we passed on to the problem in hand, congenial enemies for all time: the first round clearly his.

“Clarissa got you into this?” He looked at me over his glass.

“More or less. Clarissa to Iris to Cave was the precise play.”

“She got me to Cave last summer, or rather to Hastings first. I was sold right off. I think I told you that yesterday. This guy’s got everything. Even aside from the message, he’s the most remarkable salesman I’ve ever seen and believe me when I tell you there isn’t _anything_ I don’t know about salesmen.”

I agreed that he was doubtless expert in these matters.

“I went to about a dozen of those early meetings and I could see he was having the same effect on everyone, even on Catholics, people like that. Of course I don’t know what happens when they get home but while they’re there they’re sold and that’s all that matters because, in the next year, we’re going to have him _there_, everywhere, and all the time.”

I told him I didn’t exactly follow this metaphysic flight.

“I mean we’re going to have him on television, on movie screens, in the papers, so that everybody can feel the effect of his personality, just like he was there in person. This prayer-meeting stuff he’s been doing is just a warming up. That’s all. That kind of thing is outmoded: can’t reach enough people even if you spoke at Madison Square every night for a year, but it’s good practice, and it’s got him started. Now the next move is a TV half-hour show once a week and when that gets started we’re in.”

“Who’s going to pay for all this?”

“We’ve got more money than you can shake a stick at.” He smiled briefly and refilled our glasses with a flourish. “I haven’t been resting on my laurels and neither has Clarissa. We’ve got three of the richest men in L.A. drooling at the mouth for an opportunity to come in with us. They’re sold; they’ve talked to him; they’ve heard him. That’s been enough.”

“Will you sell soap on television at the same time?”

“Come off it, Gene. _Cave_ is the product.”

“Then in what way will you, or his sponsors, profit from selling him?”

“In the first place what he says is the truth and it’s meant a lot to me and also to them, to the tycoons: they’re willing to do anything to put him across.”

“I should think that the possession of the truth and its attendant sense of virtue is in itself enough, easily spoiled by popularization,” I said with chilling pomp.

“Now that’s a mighty selfish attitude to take. Sure it makes me happy to know at last nothing matters a hell of a lot since I’m apt to die any time and that’s the end of yours truly; a nice quiet nothing, like sleeping pills after a busy day: all that’s swell but it means a lot more to me to see the truth belong to everybody and also, let’s face it, I’m ambitious. I like my work. I want to see this thing get big, and with me part of it. Life doesn’t mean a thing and death is the only reality, like he says, but while we’re living we’ve got to keep busy and get ahead and the best thing for me, I figured about six months ago, was to put Cave over on the public, which is just what I’m going to do. Anything wrong with that?”

Since right and wrong had not yet been reformulated and codified, I gave him the comfort he hardly needed. “I see what you mean. I suppose you’re right. Perhaps the motive is the same in every case, mine as well as yours: yet we’ve all experienced Cave and that should be enough.”

“No, we should all get behind it and push, bring it to the world.”

“That, of course, is where we’re different: not that I don’t intend to 'propagate the truth,’ rather I shall do it for something to do, knowing that nothing matters, not even _this_ knowledge matters.” In my unction, I had stumbled upon the first of a series of paradoxes which were to amuse and obsess our philosophers for a generation. Paul gave me no opportunity to elaborate, however; his was the practical way and I followed. We spoke of means and ends.

“Cave likes the idea of the half-hour show and as soon as we get all the wrinkles ironed out, buying good time, not just dead air, we’ll make the first big announcement, along around January, I think. Until then we’re trying to keep this out of the papers. Slow but sure; then fast and hard.”

“What sort of man is Cave?” I wanted very much to hear Paul’s reaction to him: this was the practical man, the unobsessed.

He was candid; he did not know. “How can you figure a guy like that out? At times he seems a little feeble-minded, this is between us by the way, and other times when he’s talking to people, giving with the message, there’s nothing like him.”

“What about his early life?”

“Nobody knows very much. I’ve had a detective agency prepare a dossier on him. Does that surprise you? Well, I’m going far out on a limb for him and so are our rich friends. We had to be sure we weren’t buying an ax-murderer or a bigamist or something.”

“Would that have made any difference to the message?”

“No, _I_ don’t think so but it sure would have made it impossible for us to sell him on a big scale.”

“And what did they find?”

“Not much. I’ll let you read it. Take it home with you. Confidential of course and, as an officer of the company, I must ask you not to use any of it without clearing first with me.”

I agreed and his secretary was sent for. The dossier was a thin bound manuscript.

“It’s a carbon but I want it back. You won’t find anything very striking but you ought to read it for the background. Never been married, no girl friends that anybody remembers ... no boy friends either (what a headache _that_ problem is in Hollywood, for a firm like ours). No police record. No tickets for double parking, even. A beautiful, beautiful record on which to build.”

“Perhaps a little negative.”

“That’s what we like. As for the guy’s character, his I.Q., your guess is as good as mine, probably better. When I’m with him alone, we talk about the campaign and he’s very relaxed, very sensible, businesslike: doesn’t preach or carry on. He seems to understand all the problems of our end. He’s cooperative.”

“Can you look him straight in the eye?”

Paul laughed. “Gives you the creeps, doesn’t it? No, I guess I don’t look at him very much. I’m glad you mentioned that because I’ve a hunch he’s a hypnotist of some kind though there’s no record of his ever having studied it. I think I’ll get a psychologist to take a look at him.”

“Do you think he’ll like that?”

“Oh, he’ll never know unless he’s a mind reader. Somebody to sort of observe him at work. I’ve already had him checked out physically.”

“You’re very thorough.”

“Have to be. He’s got a duodenal ulcer and there’s a danger of high blood pressure when he’s older; otherwise he’s in fine shape.”

“What do you want me to do first?”

He became serious. “A pamphlet. You might make a highbrow magazine article out of it for the _Readers’ Digest_ or something first. We’ll want a clear, simple statement of the Cavite philosophy.”

“Why don’t you get him to write it?”

“I’ve tried. He says he can’t write anything. In fact he even hates to have his sermons taken down by a recorder. God knows why. But, in a way, it’s all to the good because it means we can get all the talent we like to do the writing for us and that way, sooner or later, we can appeal to just about everybody.”

“Whom am I supposed to appeal to in this first pamphlet?”

“The ordinary person, but make it as foolproof as you can; leave plenty of doors open so you can get out fast in case we switch the party line along the way.”

I laughed. “You’re extraordinarily cynical.”

“Just practical. I had to learn everything the hard way. I was kicked around by some mighty expert kickers in my day.”

I checked his flow of reminiscence. “Tell me about Cave and Iris.” This was the secondary mystery which had occupied my mind for several days. But Paul did not know or, if he did, would not say. “I think they’re just good friends, like we say in these parts. Except that I doubt if anything is going on ... they don’t seem the type and she’s so completely gone on what he has to say....”

A long-legged girl secretary in discreet black entered the room unbidden and whispered something to the publicist Paul started as though she had given him an electric shock from the thick carpeting. He spoke quickly: “Get Furlow. Tell him to stand bail. Also get a writ. I’ll be right down there.”

She ran from the room. He pushed the bar away from him and it rolled aimlessly across the floor, its bottles and glasses chattering. Paul looked at me distractedly. “He’s in jail. Cave’s in jail.”

FIVE

1

Last night the noise of my heart’s beating kept me awake until nearly dawn. Then, as the gray warm light of the morning patterned the floor, I fell asleep and dreamed uneasily of disaster, my dreams disturbed by the noise of jackals, by that jackal-headed god who hovers over me as these last days unfold confusedly before my eyes: it will end in heat and terror, alone beside a muddy river, all time as one and that soon gone. I awakened, breathless and cold, with a terror of the dying still ahead.

After coffee and pills, those assorted pellets which seem to restore me for moments at a time to a false serenity, I put aside the nightmare world of the previous restless hours and idly examined the pages which I had written with an eye to rereading them straight through, to relive again for a time the old drama which is already, as I write, separating itself from my memory and becoming real only in the prose: I think now of these events as I have told them and not as they occur to me in memory. For the memory now is of pages and not of scenes or of actual human beings still existing in that baleful, tenebrous region of the imagination where fancy and fact together confuse even the most confident of narrators. I have, thus far at least, exorcised demons, and to have lost certain memories to my narrative relieves my system, like a cancer cut whole from a failing organism.

The boy brought me my morning coffee and the local newspaper whose Arabic text pleases my eye though the sense, when I do translate it, is less than strange. I asked the boy if Mr. Butler was awake and he said he had gone out already: these last few days I have kept to my room even for the evening meal, delaying the inevitable revelation as long as possible.

After the boy left and while I drank coffee and looked out upon the river and the western hills, I was conscious of a sense of well-being which I have not often experienced in recent years. Perhaps the work of evoking the past has, in a sense, enhanced the present for me. I thought of the work done as life preserved, as part of me which will remain.

Then, idly, I riffled the pages of John Cave’s Testament for the first time since I had discovered my name had been expunged.

The opening was the familiar one which I had composed so many years before in Cave’s name. The time of divination: a straightforward account of the apparent wonders which had preceded the mission. No credence was given the supernatural but a good case was made (borrowed a little from the mental therapists) for the race’s need of phenomena as a symptom of unease and boredom and anticipation. I flicked through the pages. An entire new part had been added which I did not recognize: still written as though by Cave but, obviously, it could not have been composed until at least a decade after his death.

I read the new section carefully. Whoever had written it had been strongly under the influence of the pragmatic philosophers, though the style was somewhat inspirational: a combination of a guide to popularity crossed with the Koran. A whole system of ideal behavior was sketched broadly for the devout, so broadly as to be fairly useless though the commentary and the interpretive analysis of such lines as: “Property really belongs to the world though individuals may have temporary liens on certain sections,” must be already prodigious.

I was well into the metaphysics of the Cavites when there was a knock on my door. It was Butler, looking red and uncomfortable from the heat, a spotted red bandana tied, for some inscrutable reason, about his head in place of a hat.

“Hope you don’t mind my barging in like this but I finished a visit with the mayor earlier than I thought.” He crumpled, on invitation, into a chair opposite me. He sighed gloomily. “This is going to be tough, tougher than I ever imagined back home.”

“I told you it would be. The Moslems are very obstinate.”

“I’ll say! and the old devil of a mayor practically told me point-blank that if he caught me proselyting he’d send me back to Cairo. Imagine the nerve!”

“Well, it _is_ their country,” I said, reasonably, experiencing my first real hope: might the Cavites not get themselves expelled from Islam? I knew the mayor of Luxor, a genial merchant who still enjoyed the obsolete title of Pasha. The possibilities of a daring plot occurred to me. All I needed was another year or two by which time nature would have done its work in any case and the conquest of humanity by the Cavites could then continue its progress without my bitter presence.

I looked at Butler speculatively. He was such a fool. I could, I was sure, undo him, for a time at least; unless of course he was, as I first expected, an agent come to finish me in fact as absolutely as I have been finished in effect by those revisionists who have taken my place among the Cavites, arranging history.... I’d experienced, briefly, while studying Butler’s copy of the Testament, the unnerving sense of having never lived, of having dreamed the past entire.

“Maybe it is their country but we got the truth, and like Paul Himmell said: 'A truth known to only half the world is but half a truth.’”

“Did he say that?”

“Of course he did. Don’t you....” he paused. His eye taking in at last the book in my hand. His expression softened somewhat, like a parent in anger noticing suddenly an endearing resemblance to himself in the offending child. “But I forget how isolated you’ve been up here. If I’ve interrupted your studies, I’ll go away.”

“Oh no. I was finished when you came. I’ve been studying for several hours which is too long for an old man.”

“If a contemplation of Cavesword can ever be too long,” said Butler reverently. “Yes, Himmell wrote that even before Cavesword, in the month of March, I believe, though we’ll have to ask my colleague when he comes. He knows all the dates, all the facts. Remarkable guy. He has the brains of the team.” And Butler laughed to show that he was not entirely serious.

“I think they might respond to pressure,” I said, treacherously. “One thing the Arabs respect is force.”

“You may be right. But our instructions are to go slow. Still, I didn’t think it would be as slow as this. Why we haven’t been able to get a building yet. They’ve all been told by the Pasha fellow not to rent to us.”

“Perhaps I could talk to him.”

“Do you know him well?”

“We used to play cards quite regularly. I haven’t seen much of him in the past few years but, if you’d like, I’ll go and pay him a call.”

“He’s known all along you’re a Cavite, hasn’t he?”

“We have kept off the subject of religion entirely. As you probably discovered, since the division of the world, there’s been little communication between East and West. I don’t think he knows much about the Cavites except that they’re undesirable.”

“Poor creature,” said Butler, compassionately.

“Outer darkness,” I agreed.

“But mark my words before ten years have passed they will have the truth.”

“I have no doubt of that, Communicator, none at all. If the others who come out have even a tenth of your devotion the work will go fast.” The easy words of praise came back to me mechanically from those decades when a large part of my work was organizational, spurring the mediocre on to great deeds ... and the truth of the matter has been, traditionally, that the unimaginative are the stuff from which heroes and martyrs are invariably made.

“Thanks for those kind words,” said Butler, flushed now with pleasure as well as heat. “Which reminds me, I was going to ask you if you’d like to help us with our work once we get going?”

“I’d like nothing better but I’m afraid my years of useful service are over. Any advice, however, or perhaps influence that I may have in Luxor....” There was a warm moment of mutual esteem and amiability, broken only by a reference to the Squad of Belief.

“Of course we’ll have one here in time; though we can say, thankfully, that the need for them in the Atlantic states is nearly over. Naturally, there are always a few malcontents but we have worked out a statistical ratio of nonconformists in the population which is surprisingly accurate. Knowing their incidence, we are able to check them early. In general, however, the truth is happily ascendant everywhere in the really civilized world.”

“What are their methods now?”

“The Squad of Belief’s? Psychological indoctrination. We now have methods of converting even the most obstinate lutherist. Of course where usual methods fail (and once in every fifteen hundred they do), the Squad is authorized to remove a section of brain which effectively does the trick of making the lutherist conform, though his usefulness in a number of other spheres is somewhat impaired: I’m told he has to learn all over again how to talk and to move around.”

“Lutherist? I don’t recognize the word.”

“You certainly have been cut off from the world.” Butler looked at me curiously, almost suspiciously. “I thought even in your day that was a common expression. It means anybody who refuses willfully to know the truth.”

“What does it come from?”

“Come from?” Semantics were either no longer taught or else Butler had never been interested in them. “Why it just means, well, a lutherist.”

“I wonder, though, what the derivation of it was.” I was excited: this was the only sign that I had ever existed, a word of obscure origin connoting nonconformist.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to ask my side-kick when he comes. I don’t suppose it came from one of those Christian sects ... you know the German one which broke with Rome.”

“That must be it,” I said. “I don’t suppose in recent years there have been as many lutherists as there once were.”

“Very, very few. As I say, we’ve got it down to a calculable minority and our psychologists are trying to work out some method whereby we can spot potential lutherists in childhood and indoctrinate them before it’s too late ... but of course the problem is a negligible one in the Atlantic states. We’ve had no serious trouble for forty years.”

“Forty years ... that was the time of all the trouble,” I said.

“Not so _much_ trouble,” said Butler, undoing the bandana and mopping his face with it. “The last flare-up, I gather, of the old Christians ... history makes very little of it though I suppose at the time it must have seemed important. Now that we have more perspective we can view things in their proper light. I was only a kid in those days and, frankly, I don’t think I paid any attention to the papers. Of course _you_ remember it.” He looked at me suddenly, his great vacuous eyes focused. My heart missed one of its precarious beats: was this the beginning? had the inquisition begun?

“Not well,” I said. “I was seldom in the United States. I’d been digging in Central America, in and around the Peten. I missed most of the trouble.”

“You seem to have missed a good deal.” His voice was equable, without a trace of secondary meaning.

“I’ve had a quiet life. I’m grateful though for your coming here; otherwise. I should have died without any contact with America, without ever knowing what was happening outside the Arab League.”

“Well, we’ll shake things up around here.”

“Shake well before using,” I quoted absently.

“What did you say?”

“I said I hoped all would be well.”

“I’m sure it will. By the way, I brought you the new edition of Cave’s prison dialogues.” He pulled a small booklet from his back pocket and handed it to me.

“Thank you.” I took the booklet: dialogues between Cave and Iris Mortimer. I had never before heard of this particular work. “Is this a recent discovery?” I asked.

“Recent? Why no. It’s the newest edition but of course the text goes right back to the early days when Cave was in prison.”

“Oh, yes, in California.”

“Sure; it was the beginning of the persecutions. Well, I’ve got to be on my way.” He got heavily to his feet and arranged the bandana about his head. “Somebody stole my hat. Persecuting _me_, I’ll bet my bottom dollar ... little ways. Well, I’m prepared for them. They can’t stop us. Sooner or later the whole world will be Cavite.”

“Amen,” I said.

“What?” He looked at me with shock.

“I’m an old man,” I said hastily. “You must recall I was brought up in the old Christianity. Such expressions still linger on, you know.”

“It’s a good thing there’s no Squad of Belief in Luxor,” said Butler cheerily. “They’d have you up for indoctrination in a second.”

“I doubt if it’d be worth their trouble. Soon I shall be withdrawing from the world altogether.”

“I suppose so. You haven’t thought of taking Cavesway have you?”

“Of course, many times, but since my health has been good I’ve been in no great hurry to leave my contemplation of those hills.” I pointed to the western window. “Now I should hesitate to die until the very last moment, out of curiosity. I’m eager to learn, to help as much as possible in your work here.”

“Well, that of course is good news but should you ever want to take his way let me know. We have some marvellous methods now, extremely pleasant to take and, as he said, 'It’s not death which is hard but dying.’ We’ve finally made dying simply swell.”

“Will wonders never cease?”

“In that department, never! It is the firm basis of our truth. Now I must be off.”

“Is your colleague due here soon?”

“Haven’t heard recently. I don’t suppose the plans have been changed, though. You’ll like him.”

“I’m sure I shall.”

2

And so John Cave’s period in jail was now known as the time of persecution, with a pious prison dialogue attributed to Iris. Before I returned to my work of recollection, I glanced at the dialogue whose style was enough like Iris’s to have been her work. But of course her style was not one which could ever have been called inimitable since it was based on the most insistent of twentieth-century advertising techniques. I assumed the book was the work of others, of those anonymous counterfeiters who had created, according to a list of publications on the back of the booklet, a wealth of Cavite doctrine.

The conversation with Cave in prison was lofty in tone and seemed to deal with moral problems. It was apparent that since the task of governing is largely one of keeping order, it had become, with the passage of time, necessary for the Cavite rulers to compose in Cave’s name different works of ethical instruction to be used for the guidance and control of the population. I assume that since they now control all records, all original sources, it is an easy matter for them to “discover” some relevant text which gives clear answer to any moral or political problem which has not been anticipated in previous commentaries. The work of falsifying records, expunging names is, I should think, somewhat more tricky but they seem to have accomplished it in Cave’s Testament, brazenly assuming that those who recall the earlier versions will die off in time, leaving a generation which knows only what they wish it to know, excepting of course the “calculable minority” of nonconformists, of base Lutherists.

Cave’s term in prison was far less dramatic than official legend, though more serious. He was jailed for hit-and-run driving on the highway from Santa Monica into Los Angeles.

I went to see him that evening with Paul. When we arrived at the jail, we were not allowed near him though Paul’s lawyers had been permitted to go inside a few minutes before our arrival.

Iris was sitting in the outer office, pale and shaken. A bored policeman in uniform sat fatly at a desk at the other end of the office, ignoring us.

“They’re the best lawyers in L.A.,” said Paul quickly. “They’ll get him out in no time.”

Iris looked at him bleakly.

“What happened?” I asked, sitting down beside her on the bench. “How did it happen?”

“I wasn’t with him.” She shook her head several times as though to dispel a profound daydream. “He called me and I called you. They _are_ the best, Paul?”

“I can vouch that....”

“Did he kill anybody?”

“We ... we don’t know yet. He hit an old man and went on driving. I don’t know why; I mean why he didn’t stop. He just went on and the police car caught him. The man’s in the hospital now. They say it’s bad; he’s unconscious, an old man ...”

“Any reporters here?” asked Paul. “Anybody else know besides us?”

“Nobody. You’re the only person I called.”

“This could wreck everything.” Paul was frightened.

But Cave was rescued, at considerable expense to the company. The old man chose not to die immediately while the police and the courts of Los Angeles, at that time well known for their accessibility to free-spending reason, proved more than obliging. After a day and a night in prison. Cave was released on bail and when the case came to court, it was handled discreetly by the magistrate.

The newspapers, however, had discovered John Cave at last and there were photographs of “Present-Day Messiah in Court.” As ill luck would have it, the undertakers of Laguna had come to the aid of their prophet with banners which proclaimed his message. This picketing of the court was photographed and exhibited in the tabloids. Paul was in a frenzy. Publicist though he was, in his first rage he expressed to me the novel sentiment that not all publicity was good.

“But we’ll get back at those bastards,” he said grimly, not identifying which ones he meant but waving toward the city hidden by the Venetian blinds of his office window.

* * * * *

I asked for instructions. Cave had, the day before, gone back to Washington to lie low until the time was right for a triumphant reappearance. Iris had gone with him; on a separate plane, however, to avoid scandal. Clarissa had sent various heartening if confused messages from New York while Paul and I were left alone to gather up the pieces and begin again. Our close association during those difficult days impressed me with his talents and though, fundamentally, I still found him appalling, I couldn’t help but admire his superb operativeness.

“I’m going ahead with the original plan ... just like none of this happened. The stockholders are willing and we’ve got enough money, though not as much as I’d like, for the publicity build-up. I expect Cave’ll pick up some more cash in Seattle. He always does, wherever he goes.”

“Millionaires just flock to him?”

“Strange to tell, yes. But then nearly everybody does.”

“It’s funny since the truth he offers is all there is to it. Once experienced, there’s no longer much need for Cave or for an organization.” This of course was the paradox which time and the unscrupulous were bloodily to resolve.

Paul’s answer was reasonable. “That’s true but there’s the problem of sharing it. If millions felt the same way about death the whole world would be happier and, if it’s happier, why, it’ll be a better place to live in.”

“Do you really believe this?”

“Still think of me as a hundred percent phony?” Paul chuckled good-naturedly. “Well, it so happens, I _do_ believe that. It also so happens that if this thing clicks we’ll have a world organization and if we have that there’ll be a big place for number one in it. It’s all mixed up, Gene. I’d like to hear _your_ motives, straight from the shoulder.”

I was not prepared to answer him, or myself. In fact, to this day, my own motives are a puzzle to which there is no single key, no easy definition. One is not, after all, like those classic or neo-classic figures who wore with such splendid mono-maniacal consistency the scarlet of lust or the purple of dominion, or the bright yellow of madness, existing not at all beneath their identifying robes. Power appealed to me in my youth but only as a minor pleasure and not as an end in itself or even as a means to any private or public end. I enjoyed the idea of guiding and dominating others, preferably in the mass; yet, at the same time, I did not like the boredom of power achieved, or the silly publicness of a great life. But there was something which, often against my will and judgment, precipitated me into deeds and attitudes where the logic of the moment controlled me to such an extent that I could not lessen, if I chose, the momentum of my own wild passage, or chart its course.

I would not have confided this to Paul even had I in those days thought any of it out, which I had not. Though I was conscious of some fundamental ambivalence in myself, I always felt that should I pause for a few moments and question myself, I could easily find answers to these problems. But I did not pause. I never asked myself a single question concerning motive. I acted like a man sleeping who was only barely made conscious by certain odd incongruities that he dreams. The secret which later I was to discover was still unrevealed to me as I faced the efficient vulgarity of Paul Himmell across the portable bar which reflected so brightly in its crystal his competence.

“My motives are perfectly simple,” I said, half-believing what I said. In those days the more sweeping the statement the more apt I was to give it my fickle allegiance: motives are simple, splendid! simple they are. “I want something to do. I’m fascinated by Cave and I believe what he says ... not that it is so supremely earthshaking. It’s been advanced as a theory off and on for two thousand years. Kant wrote that he anticipated with delight the luxurious sleep of the grave and the Gnostics came close to saying the same thing when they promised a glad liberation from life. The Eastern religions, about which I know very little, maintain ...”

“That’s it!” Paul interrupted me eagerly. “That’s what we want. You just keep on like that. We’ll call it 'An Introduction to John Cave.’ Make a small book out of it. Get it published in New York; then the company will buy up copies and we’ll pass it out free.”

“I’m not so sure that I know enough formal philosophy to ...”

“To hell with that stuff. You just root around and show how the old writers were really Cavites at heart and then you come to him and put down what he says. Why we’ll be half-there even before he’s on TV!” Paul lapsed for a moment into a reverie of promotion. I had another drink and felt quite good myself although I had serious doubts about my competence to compose philosophy in the popular key. But Paul’s faith was infectious and I felt that, all in all, with a bit of judicious hedging and recourse to various explicit summaries and definitions, I might put together a respectable ancestry for Cave whose message, essentially, ignored _all_ philosophy, empiric and orphic, moving with hypnotic effectiveness to the main proposition: death and man’s acceptance of it. The problems of life were always quite secondary to Cave, if not to the rest of us.

“When will you want this piece done?”

“The sooner the better. Here,” he scribbled an address on a pad of paper. “This is Cave’s address. He’s on a farm outside Spokane. It belongs to one of his undertaker friends.”

“Iris is with him?”

“Yes. Now you ...”

“I wonder if that’s wise, Iris seeing so much of him. You know he’s going to have a good many enemies before very long and they’ll dig around for any scandal they can find.”

“Oh, it’s perfectly innocent, I’m sure. Even if it isn’t, I can’t see how it can do much harm.”

“For a public relations man you don’t seem to grasp the possibilities for bad publicity in this situation.”

“All pub ...”

“Is good. But Cave, it appears is a genuine ascetic.” And the word “genuine” as I spoke it was like a knife-blade in my heart. “And, since he is, you have a tremendous advantage in building him up. There’s no use in allowing him, quite innocently, to appear to philander.”

Paul looked at me curiously. “You wouldn’t by chance be interested in Iris yourself?”

And of course that was it. I had become attached to Iris in precisely the same sort of way a complete man might have been but of course for me there was no hope, nothing. The enormity of that nothing shook me, despite the alcohol we had drunk. I was sufficiently collected, though, not to make the mistake of vehemence. “I like her very much but I’m more attached to the idea of Cave than I am to her. I don’t want to see the business get out of hand. That’s all. I’m surprised you, of all people involved, aren’t more concerned.”

“You may have a point. I suppose I’ve got to adjust my views to this thing ... it’s different from my usual work building up crooners and movie stars. In that line the romance angle is swell, just as long as there’re no bigamies or abortions involved. I see your point, though. With Cave we have to think in sort of Legion of Decency terms. No rough stuff. No nightclub pictures or posing with blondes. You’re absolutely right. Put that in your piece: doesn’t drink, doesn’t go out with dames....”

I laughed at this seriousness. “Maybe we won’t have to go that far. The negative virtues usually shine through all on their own. The minute you draw attention to them you create suspicion: people are generally pleased to suspect the opposite of every avowal.”

“You talk just like my analyst.” And I felt that I had won, briefly, Paul’s admiration. “Anyway, you go to Spokane; talk to Iris; tell her to lay off ... in a tactful way of course. I wouldn’t mention it to him: you never can tell how he’ll react. She’ll be reasonable even though I suspect she’s stuck on the man. Try and get your piece done by the first of December. I’d like to have it in print for the first of the New Year, Cave’s year.”

“I’ll try.”

“By the way, we’re getting an office ... same building as this. The directors okayed it and we’ll take over as soon as there’s some furniture in it.”

“Cavites, Inc.?”

“We could hardly call it the Church of the Golden Rule,” said Paul with one of the few shows of irritability I was ever to observe in his equable disposition. “Now, on behalf of the directors, I’m authorized to advance you whatever money you might feel you need for this project; that is, within ...”

“I won’t need anything except, perhaps, a directorship in the company.” My own boldness startled me. Paul laughed.

“That’s a good boy. Eye on the main chance. Well, we’ll see what we can do about that. There aren’t any more shares available right now but that doesn’t mean.... I’ll let you know when you get back from Spokane.”

Our meeting was ended by the appearance of his secretary who called him away to other business. As we parted in the outer office, he said, quite seriously, “I don’t think Iris likes him the way you think but if she does be careful. We can’t upset Cave now. This is a tricky time for everyone. Don’t show that you suspect anything when you’re with him. Later, when we’re under way, and there’s less pressure, I’ll handle it. Agreed?”

I agreed, secretly pleased at being thought in love ... “in love,” to this moment the phrase has a strangely foreign sound to me, like a classical allusion not entirely understood in some decorous, scholarly text. “In love,” I whispered to myself in the elevator as I left Paul that evening: in love with Iris.

3

We met at the Spokane railroad station and Iris drove me through the wide, clear, characterless streets to a country road which wound east into the hills, in the direction of a town with the lovely name of Coeur d’Alene.

She was relaxed. Her ordinarily pale face was faintly burned from the sun while her hair, which I recalled as darkly waving, was now streaked with light and worn loosely bound at the nape of her neck. She wore no cosmetics and her dress was simple cotton beneath the sweater she wore against the autumn’s chill. She looked young, younger than either of us actually was.

At first we talked of Spokane. She identified mountains and indicated hidden villages with an emphasis on places which sharply recalled Cave. Not until we had turned off the main highway into a country road, dark with fir and spruce, did she ask me about Paul.

“He’s very busy getting the New Year’s debut ready. He’s also got a set of offices for the company in Los Angeles and he’s engaged me to write an introduction to Cave ... but I suppose you knew that when he wired you I was coming.”

“It was my idea.”

“My coming? or the introduction?”

“Both. I talked to him about it just before we came up here.”

“And I thought he picked it out of the air while listening to me majestically place Cave among the philosophers.”

Iris smiled. “Paul’s not obvious. He enjoys laying traps and, as long as they’re for one’s own good, he’s very useful.”

“Implying he could be destructive?”

“Immensely. So be on your guard even though I don’t think he’ll harm any of us.”

“How is Cave?”

“I’m worried, Gene. He hasn’t got over that accident. He talks about it continually.”

“But the man didn’t die.”

“It would be better if he did ... as it is there’s a chance of a lawsuit against Cave for damages.”

“But he has no money.”

“That doesn’t prevent them from suing. Worst of all, though, would be the publicity. The whole thing has depressed John terribly. It was all I could do to keep him from announcing to the press that he had almost done the old man a favor.”

“You mean by killing him?”

Iris nodded, quite seriously. “That’s actually what he believes and the reason why he drove on.”

“I’m glad he said nothing like that to the papers.”

“But it’s true; his point of view _is_ exactly right.”

“Except that the old man might regard the situation in a different light and, in any case, he was badly hurt and did not receive Cave’s gift of death.”

“Now you’re making fun of John.” She frowned and drove fast on the empty road.

“I’m doing no such thing. I’m absolutely serious. There’s a moral problem involved which is extremely important and if a precedent is set too early, a bad one like this, there’s no predicting how things will turn out.”

“You mean the ... the gift as you call it should only be given voluntarily?”

“Exactly ... _if_ then, and only in extreme cases. Think what might happen if those who listened to Cave decided to make all their friends and enemies content by killing them.”

“Well, I wish you’d talk to him.” She smiled sadly. “I’m afraid I don’t always see things clearly when I’m with him. You know how he is ... how he convinces.”

“I’ll talk to him tactfully. I’ve also got to get a statement of belief from him.”

“But you have it already. We all have it.”

“Then I’ll want some moral application of it. We have so much ground to cover yet.”

“There’s the farm, up there on the hill.” A white frame building stood shining among elms on a low hill at the foot of blue sharp mountains. She turned up a dirt road and, in silence, we arrived at the house.

An old woman, the cook, greeted us familiarly and told Iris that _he_ could be found in the study.

In a small warm room, sitting beside a stone fireplace empty of fire, Cave sat, a scrapbook on his knees, his expression vague, unfocused. Our arrival recalled him from some dense reverie. He got to his feet quickly and shook hands; “I’m glad you came,” he said.

“I wanted to see you,” I said awkwardly: it was Cave’s particular gift to strike a note of penetrating sincerity at all times, even in his greetings which became, as a result, disconcertingly like benedictions. Iris excused herself and I sat beside him in front of the fireplace.

“Have you seen these?” he asked, pushing the scrapbook toward me.

I took it and nodded when I saw, neatly pasted and labeled, the various newspaper stories concerning the accident. It had got a surprisingly large amount of space as though, instinctively, the editors had anticipated a coming celebrity for “Hit-and-Run Prophet.”

“Look what they say about me.”

“I’ve read them all,” I said, handing the scrapbook back to him, a little surprised that, considering his unworldliness, he had bothered to keep such careful track of his appearance in the press. It showed a new, rather touching side to him: he was like an actor hoarding his notices, good and bad. “I don’t think it’s serious: after all you were let off by the court, and the man didn’t die.”

“It was an accident of course yet that old man nearly received the greatest gift a man can have, a quick death. I wanted to tell the court that. I could’ve convinced them, I’m sure, but Paul said no. It was the first time I’ve ever gone against my own instinct and I don’t like it.” Emphatically, he shut the book.

We watched the cook who came into the room and lit the fire. When the first crackling filled the room and the pine had caught, she left, observing that we were to eat in an hour.

“You want to wash up?” asked Cave mechanically, his eyes on the fire, his hands clasped in his lap like those dingy marble replicas of hands which decorate medieval tombs: that night there was an unhuman look to Cave: pale, withdrawn, inert ... his lips barely moving when he spoke, as though another’s voice spoke through senseless flesh.

“No thanks,” I said, a little chilled by his tone, by his remoteness. I got him off the subject of the accident as quickly as possible and we talked until dinner of the introduction I was to write. It was most enlightening. As I suspected, Cave had read only the Bible and that superficially, just enough to be able, at crucial moments, to affect the seventeenth-century prose of the translators and to confound thereby simple listeners with the familiar authority of his manner. His knowledge of philosophy did not even encompass the names of the principals. Plato and Aristotle rang faint, unrelated bells and with them the meager carillon ended.

“I don’t know why you want to drag in those people,” he said, after I had suggested Zoroaster as a possible point of beginning. “Most people have never heard of them either. And what I have to say is all my own. It doesn’t tie in with any of them or, if it does, it’s a coincidence because I never picked it up anywhere.”

“I think, though, that it would help matters if we did provide a sort of family tree for you, to show....”