Chapter V: Part 5

“I don’t.” He gestured with his effigy-hands. “Let them argue about it later. For now, act like this is a new beginning, which it is. I have only one thing to give people and that is the way to die without fear, gladly ... to accept nothing for what it is, a long and dreamless sleep.”

I had to fight against that voice, those eyes which as always, when he chose, could dominate any listener. Despite my close association with him, despite the thousands of times I heard him speak, I was never, even in moments of lucid disenchantment, quite able to resist his power. He was a magician in the great line of Simon Magus and the Faust of legend. That much, even now, I will acknowledge ... his divinity, however, was and is the work of others, shaped and directed by the race’s recurrent need.

I surrendered in the name of philosophy with a certain relief, and he spoke in specific terms of what he believed and what I should write in his name.

It was not until after dinner that we got around, all three of us, to a problem which was soon to absorb us all, with near-disastrous results.

We had been talking amiably of neutral things and Cave had emerged somewhat from his earlier despondency. He got on to the subject of the farm where we were, of its attractiveness and remoteness, of its owner who lived in Spokane.

“I always liked old Smathers. You’d like him too. He’s got one of the biggest funeral parlors in the state. I used to work for him and then, when I started on all this, he backed me up to the hilt. Lent me money to get as far as San Francisco. After that of course it was easy. I paid him back every cent.”

“Does he get here often?”

Cave shook his head. “No, he lets me use the farm but he keeps away. He says he doesn’t approve of what I’m doing. You see he’s Catholic.”

“But he still likes John,” said Iris who had been stroking a particularly ugly yellow cat beside the fire. So it was John now, I thought. Iris was the only person ever to call him by his first name.

“Yes. He’s a good friend.”

“There’ll be a lot of trouble, you know,” I said.

“From Smathers?”

“No, from the Catholics, from the Christians.”

“You really think so?” Cave looked at me curiously. I believe that until that moment he had never realized the inevitable collision of his point of view with that of the established religions.

“Of course I do. They’ve constructed an entire ethical system upon a supernatural foundation whose main strength is the promise of a continuation of human personality after death. You are rejecting grace, heaven, hell, the Trinity ...”

“I’ve never said anything about the Trinity or about Christianity.”

“But you’ll _have_ to say something about it sooner or later. If--or rather when--the people begin to accept you, the churches will fight back and the greater the impression you make the more fierce their attack.”

“I suspect John _is_ the anti-Christ,” said Iris and I saw from her expression that she was perfectly serious. “He’s come to undo all the wickedness of the Christians.”

“Though not, I hope, of Christ,” I said. “There’s some virtue in his legend, even as corrupted at Nicea three centuries after the fact.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” said Cave. “I don’t know that I’ve ever given it much thought before. I’ve spoken always what I knew was true and there’s never been any opposition, at least that I’ve been aware of, to my face. It never occurred to me that people who like to think of themselves as Christians couldn’t accept both me and Christ at the same time. I know I don’t promise the kingdom of heaven but I _do_ promise oblivion and the loss of self, of pain....”

“Gene is right,” said Iris. “They’ll fight you hard. You must get ready now while you still have time to think it out, before Paul puts you to work and you’ll never have a moment’s peace again.”

“As bad as that, you think?” Cave sighed wistfully. “But how to get ready? What shall I do? I never think things out, you know. Everything occurs to me on the spot. I can never tell what may occur to me next. It happens only when I speak to people. When I’m alone, I seldom think of the ... the main things; yet, when I’m in a group talking to them I hear ... no, not hear, I _feel_ voices telling me what I should say. That’s why I never prepare a talk, why I don’t really like to have them taken down: they’re something which are meant only for the instant they are conceived ... a child, if you like, made for just a moment’s life by the people listening and myself speaking. I don’t mean to sound touched,” he added, with a sudden smile. “I’m not really hearing things but I do get something from those people, something besides the thing I tell them. I seem to become a part of them, as though what goes on in their minds also goes on in me, at the same time, two lobes to a single brain.”

“We know that, John,” said Iris softly. “We’ve felt it.”

“I suppose, then, that’s the key,” said Cave. “Though it isn’t much to write about; you can’t put it across without me to say it.”

“You may be wrong there,” I said. “Of course in the beginning you will say the word but I think in time, properly managed, everyone will accept it on the strength of evidence and statement, responding to the chain of forces you have set in motion.” Yet for all the glibness with which I spoke, I did not really believe that Cave would prove to be more than an interesting momentary phenomenon whose “truth” about death might, at best, contribute in a small way to the final abolition of those old warring superstitions which had mystified and troubled men for twenty dark centuries. A doubt which displayed my basic misunderstanding of our race’s will to death and, worse, to a death in life made radiant by false dreams, by desperate adjurations.

But that evening we spoke only of a bright future: “To begin again is the important thing,” I said. “Christianity, though strong as an organization in this country, is weak as a force because, finally, the essential doctrine is not accepted by most of the people: the idea of a man-like God dispensing merits and demerits at time’s exotic end.”

“We are small,” said Cave. “In space, on this tiny planet, we are nothing. Death brings us back to the whole. We lose this instant of awareness, of suffering, like spray in the ocean: there it forms ... there it goes, back to the sea.”

“I think people will listen to you because they realize now that order, if there is any, has never been revealed, that death is the end of personality even for those passionate, self-important 'I’s’ who insist upon a universal deity like themselves, carefully presented backwards in order not to give the game away.”

“How dark, how fine the grave must be! only sleep and an end of days, an end of fear: the end of fear in the grave as the 'I’ goes back to nothing....”

“How wonderful life will be when men no longer fear dying! When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity that we have met life. No longer will children’s minds be twisted by evil, demanding, moralizing gods whose fantastic origin is in those barbaric tribes who feared death and lightning, who feared life. That’s it: life is the villain to those maniacs who preach reward in death: grace and eternal bliss ... or dark revenge....”

“Neither revenge nor reward, only the not-knowing in the grave which is the same for all....”

“And without those inhuman laws, what societies we might build! Take the morality of Christ. Begin there, or even earlier with Plato or earlier yet with Zoroaster ... take the best ideas of the best men and should there be any disagreement as to what is best, use life as the definition, life as the measure: what contributes most to the living is the best.”

“But the living is soon done and the sooner done the better. I envy those who have already gone....”

“If they listen to you, Cave, it will be like the unlocking of a prison. At first they may go wild but then, on their own, they will find ways to life. Fear and punishment in death has seldom stopped the murderer’s hand. The only two things which hold him from his purpose are, at the worst, fear of reprisal from society and, at the best, a feeling for life, a love for all that lives ... and not the wide-smiling idiot’s love but a sense of the community of the living, of life’s marvelous regency ... even the most ignorant has felt this. Life is all while death is only the irrelevant shadow at the end, the counterpart to that instant before the seed lives.”

Yes, I believed all that, all that and more too, and I felt Cave was the same as I; by removing fear with that magic of his, he would fulfill certain hopes of my own and (I flatter myself perhaps) of the long line of others, nobler than I, who had been equally engaged in attempting to use life more fully. And so that evening it welled up suddenly: the hidden conviction behind a desultory life broke through that chill hard surface of disappointment and disgust which had formed a brittle carapace about my heart. I had, after all, my truth too, and Cave had got to it, broken the shell ... and for that I shall remain grateful ... until we are at last the same, both taken by dust.

Excitedly, we talked ... I talked mostly, I think. Cave was the theme and I the counterpoint or so I thought. He had stated it and I built on it, built outward from what I conceived to be the luminosity of his vision. Our dialogue was one of communion, I believed and he believed too. Only Iris guessed, even then, that it was not. She saw the difference; she was conscious of the division which that moment had, unknown to either of us, separated me from Cave. _Each time I said “life,” he said “death.”_ In true amity but false concord war began.

Iris, more practical than we, deflated our visions by pulling the dialogue gently back to reality, to ways and dull means.

It was agreed that we had agreed on fundamentals, that the end of fear was desirable; that superstition should be exorcised from human affairs; that the ethical systems expressed by the major religious figures from Zoroaster to Mohammed all contained useful and applicable ideas of societal behavior which need not be entirely discarded.

At Iris’s suggestion, we left the problem of Christianity itself completely alone. Cave’s truth was sufficient cause for battle. There was no reason, she felt, for antagonizing the ultimate enemy at the very beginning.

“Let them attack _you_, John. You must be above quarreling; you must act as if they are too much in error even to notice.”

“I reckon I _am_ above it,” said Cave and he sounded almost cheerful for the first time since my arrival. “I want no trouble, but if trouble comes I don’t intend to back down. I’ll just go on saying what I know.”

At midnight, Cave excused himself and went to bed.

Iris and I sat silently before the last red embers on the hearth. I sensed that something had gone wrong but I could not tell then what it was.

When she spoke, her manner was abrupt: “Do you really want to go on with this?”

“What an odd time to ask me that. Of course I do. Tonight’s the first time I really saw what it was Cave meant, what it was I’d always felt but never before known, consciously, that is. I couldn’t be more enthusiastic.”

“I hope you don’t change.”

“Why so glum? What are you trying to say? After all you got me into this.”

“I know I did and I think I was right. It’s only that this evening I felt ... well, I don’t know. Perhaps I’m getting a bit on edge.” She smiled and, through all the youth and health, I saw that she was anxious and ill-at-ease.

“That business about the accident?”

“Mainly, yes. The lawyers say that now that the old man’s all right he’ll try to collect damages. He’ll sue Cave.”

“Nasty publicity.”

“The worst. It’s upset John terribly ... he almost feels it’s an omen.”

“I thought we were dispensing with all that, with miracles and omens.” I smiled but she did not.

“Speak for yourself.” She got up and pushed at the coals with the fire shovel. “Paul says he’ll handle everything but I don’t see how. There’s no way he can stop a lawsuit.”

But I was tired of this one problem which was, all things considered, out of our hands in any case. I asked her about herself and Cave.

“Is it wise my being up here with John, alone? No, I’m afraid not but that’s the way it is.” Her voice was hard and her back which was turned to me grew stiff, her movements with the fire shovel angry and abrupt.

“People will use it against both of you. It may hurt him, and all of us.”

She turned suddenly, her face flushed. “I can’t help it, Gene. I swear I can’t. I’ve tried to keep away. I almost flew East with Clarissa but when he asked me to join him here, I did. I couldn’t leave him.”

“Will marriage be a part of the new order?”

“Don’t joke.” She sat down angrily in a noise of skirts crumpling. “Cave must never marry. Besides it’s ... it isn’t like that.”

“Really? I must confess I ...”

“Thought we were having an affair? Well, it’s not true.” The rigidity left her as suddenly as it had possessed her. She grew visibly passive, even helpless, in the worn upholstered chair, her eyes on me, the anger gone and only weakness left. “What can I do?” It was a cry from the heart ... all the more touching because, obviously, she had not intended to tell me this. She’d turned to me because there was no one else to whom she could talk.

“You ... love him?” That word which whenever I spoke it in those days always stuck in my throat like a diminutive sob.

“More, more,” she said distractedly. “But I can’t _do_ anything or _be_ anything. He’s complete. He doesn’t need anyone. He doesn’t want me except as ... a companion, and advisor like you or Paul ... it’s all the same to him.”

“I don’t see that it’s hopeless.”

“Hopeless!” The word snot from her like a desperate deed. She buried her face in her hands but she did not weep. I sat awkwardly, inadequately watching her. The noise of a clock alone separated us: its dry ticking kept the silence from falling in about our heads.

Finally, she dropped her hands and turned toward me with her usual grace, “You mustn’t take me too seriously,” she said. “Or I mustn’t take myself too seriously which is more to the point. Cave doesn’t really need me or anyone and we ... I, perhaps you, certainly others, need him. It’s best no one try to claim him all as a woman would do, as I might, given the chance.” She rose. “It’s late and you must be tired. Don’t ever mention to anyone what I’ve told you tonight ... especially to John. If he knew the way I felt....” She left it at that. I gave my promise and we went to our rooms.

I stayed two days at the farm, listening to Cave who continually referred to the accident: he was almost petulant, as though the whole business were an irrelevant, gratuitous trick played on him by a malicious old man.

His days were spent reading his mail (there was quite a bit of it even then), composing answers which Iris typed out for him, and walking in the wooded hills which surrounded the farm on two sides.

The weather was sharp and bright and the wind, when it blew, tasted of ice from the glaciers in the vivid mountains: winter was nearly with us and red leaves decorated the wind, so many ribbons for so much summer color. Only the firs remained unchanged, warm and dark in the bright chill days.

Cave and I would walk together while Iris remained indoors, working. He was a good walker, calm, unhurried, sure-footed, and he knew all the trails beneath the yellow and red leaves fallen.

Cave agreed with me on most of my ideas concerning the introduction; and I promised to send him my first draft as soon as I’d got it done. He was genuinely indifferent to the philosophic aspect of what he preached. He acted almost as if he did not want to hear of those others who had approached the great matter in a similar way. When I talked to him of the fourth-century Donatists who detested life and loved heaven so much that they would request strangers to kill them, magistrates to execute them for no crime, he stopped me: “I don’t want to hear all that. That’s finished. All that’s over. We want new things now.”

Iris, too, seemed uninterested in any formalizing of Cave’s thought though she saw its necessity and wished me well, suggesting that I not ever intimate derivation since, in fact, there had been none: what he was, he had become on his own, uninstructed.

During our walks, I got to know Cave as well as I was ever to know him. He was indifferent, I think, to everyone. He gave one his private time in precise ratio to one’s belief in him and importance to his work. With groups, with the masses, he was another creature: warm, intoxicating, human, yet transcendent ... a part of each human being who beheld him at such times, the longed-for complement to the common soul.

Yet though I found him, as a human being, without much warmth or intellectual interest I nevertheless identified him with the release I’d known in his presence and, for this new certainty of life’s value and of death’s irrelevance, I loved him.

On the third day I made up my mind to go back East and do the necessary writing in New York, away from Paul’s hectic influence and Cave’s advice. Cave asked me to stay with him for the rest of the week but I could see that Iris regarded me now as a potential danger, a keeper of secrets who might, despite promises, prove to be disloyal; and so, to set her mind at ease as well as to suit my own new plans, I told her after lunch on the third day, when we were for a moment alone in the study, that I had said nothing to Cave, that I was ready to go back that evening if she would drive me to Spokane.

“You’re a good friend,” she said. “I made a fool of myself the other night. I wish you’d forget it ... forget everything I said.”

“I’ll never mention it. Now, the problem is how I can leave here gracefully. Cave just asked me this morning to stay on and ...”

But I was given a perfect means of escape. Cave came running into the room, his eyes shining. “Paul! I’ve just talked to Paul in L.A. It’s all over! No heirs, nothing, no lawsuit. No damages to pay.”

“What’s happened?” Iris stopped him in his excitement.

“The old man’s dead!”

“Oh Lord!” Iris went gray. “That means a manslaughter charge!”

“No, no ... not because of the accident. He was in _another_ accident. A truck hit him the day after he left the hospital. Yesterday. He was killed instantly ... lucky devil: and of course we’re in luck too.”

“Did they find who hit him?” I asked, suddenly suspicious. Iris looked at me fiercely. She had got it too.

“No. Paul said it was a hit-and-run. He said this time the police didn’t find who did it. Paul said his analyst calls it 'a will to disaster’ ... he _wanted_ to be run over. Of course that’s hardly a disaster but the analyst thinks the old way.”

I left that afternoon for New York, leaving Cave jubilantly making plans for the New Year: everything was again possible. Neither Iris nor I mentioned what we both knew ... each of us, in our different way, accommodating the first of many crimes, as we drove across the smoky hills to Spokane.

SIX

1

“The tone, dear Gene, has all the unction, all the earnest turgidity of a theologian. You are perfect.” Clarissa beamed at me wickedly over lunch in the Plaza Hotel. We sat at a table beside a great plate-glass window through which we could see the frosted bleak expanse of Central Park, dingy in city snow, ringed by buildings like so many mountain peaks, monotonous in their sharp symmetry. The sky was sullen, gray with more snow to fall. The year was nearly over.

“I thought it really quite to the point,” I said loftily but with an anxious look at the thin black volume between us which was that day to be published. The hasty work of one hectic month released in record time by a connection of Paul Himmell’s.

“It’s pure nonsense, your historical part. _I_ know, though I confess I was never one for the philosophers in those days ... dreary _egotistical_ men, worse than the actors and not half so lovely. Waiter, I will have a melon: out of season I hope. I suggest you have it too. It’s light.”

I ordered _pot-de-crême_, the heaviest dessert on the menu.

“I’ve made you angry,” Clarissa pretended contrition. “I was only trying to compliment you. What I meant was that the sort of thing you’re doing I think is nonsense only because action is what counts, action on any level ... not theorizing.”

“There’s a certain action to _thinking_, you know, even to writing about the thoughts of others.”

“Oh, darling, don’t sound so stuffy. Your dessert, by the way, poisons the liver. Oh, isn’t that Bishop Winston over there by the door, in tweed? In mufti, eh, Bishop?”

The Bishop, who was passing our table in the company of a handsomely pale youth whose contemplation of orders shone in his face like some cherished sin, stopped and, with a smile, shook Clarissa’s hand.

“Ah, how are you? I missed you the other night at Agnes’s. She told me you’ve been engaged in social work.”

“A euphemism, Bishop.” Clarissa introduced me and the prelate moved on to his table, a robust gray-haired man with good coloring and a look of ease.

“Catholic?”

“No, Episcopal. I like them the best, I think. They adore society and good works ... spiritual Whigs you might call them, a civilizing influence. Best of all, so few of them believe in God, unlike the Catholics or those terrible Calvinist peasants who are forever saving themselves and damning others.”

“I think, Clarissa, you’re much too hard on the Episcopalians. I’m sure they must believe what they preach. At least the clergy do.”

“Well, we shall probably never know. Social work! I knew Agnes would come up with something altogether wrong. Still, I’m just as glad it’s not out yet. Not until the big debut tomorrow afternoon. I hope you’ve made arrangements to be near a television set. No? Then come to my place and we’ll see it together. Cave’s asked us both to the station, by the way, but I think it better if we not distract him.”

“Iris came East with him?”

“Indeed she did. They both arrived last night. I thought you’d talked to her.”

“No. I haven’t been in touch with either of them since I got back to New York. Paul’s the only one I ever see.”

“He keeps the whole thing going, I must say. One of those born organizers. Now! what about you and Iris?”

This came so suddenly, without preparation, that it took me a suspiciously long time to answer, weakly: “I don’t know what you mean. What about Iris and me?”

“Darling, I know _everything_.” She looked at me in her eager, predatory way: I was secretly pleased that, in this particular case at least, she knew nothing.

“Then tell _me_.”

“You’re in love with her and she’s classically involved with Cave.”

“Classical seems to be the wrong word. Nothing has happened and nothing _will_ happen.”

“I suppose she told you this herself.”

I was trapped for a moment. Clarissa, even in error, was shrewd and if one was not on guard she would quickly cease to be in error, at one’s expense.

“No, not exactly; but Paul who does, I think, know everything about our affairs assures me that nothing has happened, that Cave is not interested in women.”

“In men?”

“I thought you were all-knowing. No, not in men nor in wild animals nor, does it seem, from the evidence Paul’s collected, in anything except John Cave. Sex does not happen for him.”

“Oh,” said Clarissa, exhaling slowly, significantly, inscrutably. She abandoned her first line of attack to ask: “But _you_ are crazy about Iris, aren’t you? That’s what I’d intended, you know, when I brought you two together.”

“I thought it was to bring me into Cave’s orbit.”

“That, too, but somehow I saw you and Iris ... well, you’re obviously going to give me no satisfaction so I shall be forced to investigate on my own.”

“Not to sound too auctorial, too worried, do you think it will get Cave across? the introduction here?”

“I see no reason why not. Look at the enormous success of those books with tides like 'Eternal Bliss Can Be Yours for the Asking’ or 'Happiness at Your Beck-and-Call.’”

“I’m a little more ambitious.”

“Not in the least. But the end served is the same. You got down the main line of Cave’s thinking, if it can be called thinking. And your book, along with his presence, should have an extraordinary effect.”

“Do you really think so? I’ve begun to doubt.”

“Indeed I do. They are waiting ... all those sad millions who want to believe will find him exactly right for their purposes. He exists only to be believed in. He’s a natural idol ... did you know that when Constantine moved his court to the East, his heirs were trained by Eastern courtiers to behave like idols and when his son came in triumph back to Rome (what a day that was! hot, but exciting) he rode for hours through the crowded streets without once moving a finger or changing expression, a perfectly trained god. We were all so impressed ...”

I cut this short. “Has it occurred to you that they might not want to believe anything, just like you and me.”

“Nonsense ... and it’s rude to interrupt, dear, even a garrulous relic like myself ... yet after all, in a way, we _do_ believe what Cave says. Death is there and he makes it seem perfectly all right, oblivion and the rest of it. And dying does rather upset a lot of people. Have you noticed one thing that the devoutly superstitious can never understand is the fact that though we do not accept the fairy tale of reward or punishment beyond the grave we still are reluctant to 'pass on,’ as the nuts say? As though the prospect of nothing isn’t really, in a way, without friend Cave to push one into acceptance, perfectly ghastly, _much_ worse than toasting on a grid like that poor saint up north. But now I must fly. Come to the apartment at seven and I’ll give you dinner. He’s on at eight. Afterwards they’ll all join us.” Clarissa flew.

I spent the afternoon gloomily walking up and down Fifth Avenue filled with doubt and foreboding, wishing now that I had never lent myself to the conspiracy, confident of its failure and of the rude laughter or, worse, the tactful silence of friends who would be astonished to find that after so many years of promise and reflection my first book should prove to be an apologia for an obscure evangelist whose only eminence was that of having mesmerized myself and an energetic publicist, among a number of others more likely perhaps than we, to take to a crank.

The day did nothing to improve my mood and it was in a most depressed state that I went finally to Clarissa’s baroque apartment on one of the better streets and dined with her quietly, infecting her, I was darkly pleased to note, with my own grim mood. By the time Cave was announced on the vast television screen, I had reduced Clarissa, for one of the few times in our acquaintance, to silence.

Yet as the lights in the room mechanically dimmed, as the screen grew bright with color and an announcer came into focus, I was conscious of a quickening of my pulse, of a certain excitement. Here it was at last, the result of nearly a year’s careful planning. Soon, in a matter of minutes, we would know.

To my surprise Paul Himmell was introduced by the announcer who identified him perfunctorily, saying that the following half hour had been bought by Cavite, Inc.

Paul spoke briefly, earnestly. He was nervous, I could see, and his eyes moved from left to right disconcertingly as he read his introduction from cards out of view of the camera. He described Cave briefly as a teacher, as a highly regarded figure in the West. He implied it was as a public service, the rarest of philanthrophies, that a group of industrialists and businessmen were sponsoring Cave this evening.

Then Paul walked out of range of the camera leaving, briefly, a view of a chair and a table behind which a handsome blue velvet curtain fell in rich graceful folds from the invisible ceiling to an imitation marble floor. An instant later, Cave walked into view.

Both Clarissa and I leaned forward in our chairs tensely, eagerly, anxiously: we were there as well as he. This was our moment too. My hands grew cold and my throat dry.

Cave was equal to the moment. He looked tall: the scale of the table, the chair was exactly right. He wore a dark suit and a dark unfigured tie with a white shirt that gave him an austereness which, in person, he lacked. I saw Paul’s stage-managing in this.

He moved easily into range, his eyes cast down. Not until he had placed himself in front of the table and the camera had squarely centered him, did he look up, look directly into the lens. Clarissa gasped and I felt suddenly pierced: the camera, the lights had magnified rather than diminished his power. It made no difference now what he said. The magic was working.

Clarissa and I sat in the twilight of her drawing room, entirely concentrated on that vivid screen, on the dark figure upon rich blue, on the pale eyes and the hands which seldom moved. It was like some fascinating scene in a skillful play which, quite against one’s wish and aesthetic judgment, pulled one to it, became, at least for that short time beyond real time, a part of one’s own private drama of existence, all sharpened by artifice, by calculated magic.

Not until Cave was nearly finished did those first words of his, spoken so easily, so quietly, begin to come back to me as he repeated them in his coda. His voice increasing a little in volume, yet still not hurrying, not forcing, not breaking the mood which his first glance had created and which voice and eyes together maintained without once letting go. The burden of his words was, as always, the same. Yet this time it seemed more awesome, more final, undeniable ... in short, the truth. Though I’d always accepted his first premise, I had never been much impressed by the ways he found of stating it, even though I always responded to his particular power. This night, before the camera and in the sight of millions, he perfected his singular art of communication and the world was his.

When he finished, Clarissa and I sat for a moment in complete silence, the chirping of a commercial the only sound in the room. At last she said: “The brandy is over there on the console. Get me some.” Then she switched off the screen from her chair and the lights of the room brightened again.

“I feel dragged through a wringer,” she said after her first mouthful of brandy.

“I had no idea it would work so well, like this, on television.” I felt strangely empty, let down. There was hardly any doubt now of Cave’s effectiveness yet I felt joyless and depleted, as though part of my life had gone, leaving an ache.

“What a time we’re going to have.” Clarissa was beginning to recover. “I’ll bet there are a million letters by morning and Paul will be doing a jig.”

“I hope this is the right thing, Clarissa. It would be terrible if it weren’t.”

“Of course it’s right ... whatever _that_ means: if it works it’s right ... perfectly simple. Such conceptions are all a matter of fashion anyway. One year women expose only their ankle; the next year their _derrière_. What’s right one year is wrong the next. If Cave captures the popular imagination, he’ll be right until someone better comes along.”

“A little cynical.” But Clarissa was only repeating my own usual line. I was, or had been until that night on the Washington farm, a contented relativist. Cave, however, had jolted me into new ways and I was bewildered by the change, by the prospect ahead.

2

That evening was a time of triumph, at least for Cave’s companions. They arrived noisily. Paul seemed drunk, manically exhilarated, while Iris glowed in a formal gown of green shot with gold. Two men accompanied them, one a doctor whose name I didn’t catch at first and the other a man from the television network who looked wonderfully sleek and pleased and kept patting Cave on the arm every now and then, as if to assure himself he’d not vanished in smoke and fire.

Cave, still dressed in his dark suit, was mute. He sat answering questions and replying to compliments with grave nods of his head. He sat in a high brocaded chair beside the fire and drank tea which Clarissa, knowing his habits, had ordered in advance for him.

After our first burst of greetings at the door I did not speak to Cave again and soon the others left him alone and talked around him, about him yet through him, as though he had become invisible ... which seemed the case when he was not speaking, when those extraordinary eyes were veiled or cast down, as they were now, moodily studying the teacup, the pattern in the Aubusson rug at his feet.

I crossed the room to where Iris sat on the wide couch. The doctor, in the chair close to her, snuffled brandy and said, as I joined them: “Your little book, sir, is written in a complete ignorance of Jung and all those who have come after him.”

This was sudden but I answered, as graciously as possible, that I had not intended a treatise on psychoanalysis.

“Not the point, sir, if you’ll excuse me.... I am a psychiatrist, a friend of Mr Himmell’s” (so this was the analyst to whom Paul so often referred) “and I think it impossible for anyone today to write about the big things without a complete understanding of post-Jungian development....”

Iris interrupted as politely as possible. “Doctor Stokharin is a zealot, Gene. You must listen to him but, first, did you see John tonight?”

“I did, here with Clarissa: he was remarkable, even more so than in person.”

“It is the isolation,” said Stokharin, nodding. Dandruff fell lightly like dry snow from his thick brows to his dark blue lapels. “The camera separates him from everyone else. He is projected like a dream into....”

“He was so afraid at first,” said Iris, glancing across the room at the silent Cave who sat, very small and still in the brocaded chair, the teacup still balanced on one knee. “I’ve never seen him disturbed by anything before. They tried to get him to do a rehearsal but he refused. He can’t do rehearsals ... only the actual thing.”

“Fear is natural when ...” but Stokharin was in the presence of a master drawing-room tactician: Iris was, I saw at that moment, a born hostess. For all her ease and simplicity she was ruthlessly concerned with keeping order, establishing a rightness of tone which Doctor Stokharin, in his professional madness, would have completely undone, reducing the drawing room to a seminar in mental therapy, receiving public confessions judiciously, and generalizing to a captive audience. I admired Iris’s firmness, her devotion to the civilized.

“At first we hardly knew what to do.” Iris’s voice rose serenely over the East European rumblings of the doctor. “He’d always made such a point of the audience. He needed actual people to excite him. Paul wanted to fill the studio with a friendly audience but John said no. He’d try it without. When the talk began there were only a half dozen of us there: Paul, myself, and the technicians. No one else.”

“How did he manage?”

“It was the camera. He said when he walked out there he had no idea if anything would happen or not, if he could speak. Paul was nearly out of his mind with terror; we all were. Then John saw the lens of the camera. He said looking into it gave him a sudden shock, like a current of electricity passing through him, for there, in front of him, was the eye of the world and the microphone above his head was the ear into which at last he could speak. When he finished, he was transfigured. I’ve never seen him so excited. He couldn’t recall what he had said but the elation remained until....”

“Until he got here.”

“Well, nearly.” Iris smiled. “He’s been under a terrible strain these last two weeks.”

“It’ll be nothing like the traumatizing shocks in store for him during the next few days,” said Stokharin, rubbing the bole of a rich dark pipe against his nose to bring out its luster (the pipe’s luster, for the nose, straight, thick, proud, already shone like a gross baroque pearl). “Mark my words, everyone will be eager to see this phenomenon. When Paul first told me about him, I said, ah, my friend, you have found that father image for which you’ve searched since your own father was run over by a bus in your ninth (the crucial) year. Poor Paul, I said, you will be doomed to disappointment. The wish for the father is the sign of your immaturity. For a time you find him here, there ... in analysis you transfer to me. Now you meet a spellbinder and you turn to him, but it will not last. Exactly like that I talked to him. Believe me, I hold back nothing. Then I met this Cave. I watched him. Ah, what an analyst he would have made! What a manner, what power of communication: a natural healer. If only we could train him. Miss Mortimer, to you I appeal. Get him to study. The best people, the post-Jungians are all here in New York. They will train him. He would become only a lay analyst but, even so, what miracles he could perform, what therapy! We must not waste this native genius.”

“I’m afraid, Doctor, that he’s going to be too busy wasting himself to study your ... procedures,” Iris smiled, engagingly, dislike apparent in her radiant eyes. Stokharin, however, was not sensitive to hostility ... no doubt attributing such emotions to some sad deficiency in the other’s adjustment.

Iris turned to me. “Will you be in the city the whole time?”

“The whole time Cave’s here? Yes. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

“I’m glad. I’ve so much I want to talk to you about. So many things are beginning to happen. Call me tomorrow. I’ll be staying at my old place. It’s in the book.”

“Cave?”

“Is staying with Paul, out on Long Island at someone’s house. We want to keep him away from pests as much as possible.”

“Manic depression, I should say,” said Stokharin thoughtfully, his pipe now clenched between his teeth and his attention on Cave’s still figure. “With latent schizoid tendencies which ... Miss Mortimer, you must have an affair with him. You must marry him if necessary. Have children. Let him see what it is to give life to others, to live in a balanced....”

“Doctor, you are quite mad,” said Iris and she crossed the room, cool in her anger. I too got away from the doctor as quickly as I could: “False modesty, inhibited behavior, too early bowel training,” and similar phrases ringing in my ears.

Paul caught me at the door. I’d intended to slip away without saying good night, confident that Clarissa would understand, that the others would not notice. “Not going so soon, are you?” He was a little drunk, his face scarlet with excitement. “But you ought to stay and celebrate.” I murmured something about having an early appointment the next day.

“Well, see me tomorrow. We’ve taken temporary offices in the Empire State Building. The money has begun to roll in. If this thing tonight turns out the way I think it has, I’m going to be able to quit my other racket for good and devote all my time to Cave.” Already the name Cave had begun to sound more like that of an institution than of a man.

“By the way, I want to tell you what I think of the Introduction: superior piece of work. Tried it out on several highbrow friends of mine and they liked it.”

“I’m afraid....”

“That, together with the talks on television, should put this thing over with the biggest bang in years. We’ll probably need some more stuff from you, historical background, rules and regulations, that kind of thing, but Cave will tell you what he wants. We’ve hired a dozen people already to take care of the mail and inquiries. There’s also a lecture tour being prepared, all the main cities, while....”

“Paul, you’re not trying to make a religion of this, are you?” I could hold it back no longer even though both time and occasion were all wrong for such an outburst.

“Religion? Hell, no ... but we’ve got to organize. We’ve got to get this to as many people as we can. People have started looking to us (to him, that is) for guidance. We can’t let them down.”

Clarissa’s maid ushered in a Western Union messenger, laden with telegrams. “Over three hundred,” said the boy. “The station said to send them here.”

Paul paid him jubilantly and, in the excitement, I slipped away.

3

The results of the broadcast were formidable. My small book which until then had enjoyed the obscurity of being briefly noted among the recent books was taken up by excited editors who used it as a basis for hurried but exuberant accounts of the new marvel.

One night a week for the rest of that winter Cave appeared before the shining glass eye of the world and on each occasion new millions in all parts of the country listened and saw and pondered this unexpected phenomenon, the creation of their own secret anxieties and doubts, a central man.

The reactions were too numerous for me to recollect in any order or with any precise detail; but I do recall the first few months vividly: after that of course the work moved swiftly of its own and one lost track of events which tended to blur, the way casualties late in a large war do, not wringing the wearied heart as the death of one or a particular few might earlier have done.

A few days after the first broadcast, I went to see Paul at the offices which he had taken in the Empire State Building ... as high up as possible, I noted with amusement: always the maximum, the optimum.

Halfway down a corridor, between lawyers and exporters, Cavite, Inc. was discreetly identified in black upon a frosted-glass door. I went inside.

It appeared to me the way I’d always thought a newspaper office during a crisis might look. Four rooms opening in a row off one another, all with doors open, all crowded with harassed secretaries and clean-looking young men in blue serge suits carrying papers, talking in loud voices which together made the room sound like a hive at swarming time.

Though none of them knew me, no one made any attempt to ask my business or to stop me as I moved from room to room in search of Paul. Everywhere there were placards with Cave’s picture on them, calm and gloomy-looking, dressed in what was to be his official costume: a dark suit, an unfigured tie, a white shirt. I tried to overhear conversations as I passed the busy desks and groups of excited debaters, but their noise was too loud. Only one word was identifiable, sounding regularly, richly emphatic like a cello note: Cave, Cave, Cave.

In each room I saw piles of my Introduction which pleased me even though I had come already to dislike it.

The last room contained Paul, seated behind a desk with a dictaphone in one hand, three telephones on his desk (none fortunately ringing at this moment) and four male and female attendants with notebooks and pencils eagerly poised. Paul sprang from his chair when he saw me. The attendants fell back. “Here he is!” He grabbed my hand and clung to it vise-like: I could almost feel the energy pulsing in his fingertips, vibrating through his body ... his heartbeat was obviously two to my every one.

“Team, this is Eugene Luther.”

The team was properly impressed and one of the girls, slovenly but intelligent-looking, said: “It was you who brought me here. First you I mean ... and then of course Cave.”

I murmured vaguely and the others told me how clear I had made all philosophy in the light of Cavesword. (I believe it was that day, certainly that week, Cavesword was coined by Paul to denote the entire message of John Cave to the world).

Paul then shooed the team out with instructions he was not to be bothered. The door, however, was left open.

“Well, what do you think of them?” He leaned back, beaming at me from his chair.

“They seem very ... earnest,” I said, wondering not only what I was supposed to think but, more to the point, what I _did_ think of the whole business.

“I’ll say they are! I tell you, Gene, I’ve never seen anything like it. The thing’s bigger even than that damned crooner I handled ... you may remember the one. Everyone has been calling up and, look!” He pointed to several bushel baskets containing telegrams and letters. “This is only a fraction of the response since the telecast. From all over the world. I tell you, Gene, we’re in.”

“What about Cave? Where is he?”

“He’s out on Long Island. The press is on my tail trying to interview him but I say no, no go, fellows, not yet; and does that excite them! We’ve had to hire guards at the place on Long Island just to keep them away.”

“How is Cave taking it all?”

“In his stride, absolute model of coolness which is more than I am. He agrees that it’s better to keep him under wraps while the telecasts are going on. It means that curiosity about him will increase like nobody’s business. Look at this.” He showed me a proof sheet of a tabloid story: “Mystery Prophet Wows TV Audience,” with a photograph of Cave taken from the telecast and another one showing Cave ducking into a taxi, his face turned away from the camera. The story seemed most provocative and, for that complacent tabloid, a little bewildered.

“Coming out Sunday,” said Paul with satisfaction. “There’s also going to be coverage from the big circulation media. They’re going to cover the next broadcast even though we said nobody’d be allowed on the set while Cave was speaking.” He handed me a bundle of manuscript pages bearing the title “Who Is Cave?” “That’s the story I planted in one of the slick magazines. Hired a name-writer, as you can see, to do it.” The name-writer’s name was not known to me but, presumably, it would be familiar to the mass audience.

“And, biggest of all, we got a sponsor. We had eleven offers already and we’ve taken Dumaine Chemicals. They’re paying us enough money to underwrite this whole setup here, and pay for Cave and me as well. It’s terrific but dignified. Just a simple 'through the courtesy of’ at the beginning and another at the end of each telecast. What do you think of that?”

“Unprecedented!” I had chosen my word some minutes before ... one which would have a cooling effect.

“I’ll say. By the way, we’re getting a lot of stuff on that book of yours.” He reached in a drawer and pulled out a manila folder which he pushed toward me. “Take them home if you like. Go over them carefully ... might give you some ideas for the next one; you know: ground which needs covering.”

“Is there to be a next one?”

“Man, a flock of next ones! We’ve got a lot to do, to explain. People want to know all kinds of things. I’m having the kids out in the front office do a breakdown on all the letters we’ve got: to get the general reaction ... what it is people most want to hear, and, believe me, we’ve been getting more damned questions, and not just the main thing but family problems too, things like that: 'Please, Mr. Cave, I’m married to two men and feel maybe it’s a mistake since I have to work nights anyway.’ Lord, some of them are crazier than that.”

“Are you answering all of them?”

“Oh, yes, but in my name. All except a few of the most interesting which go to Cave for personal attention. I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a counselor-service for people with problems.”

“But what can _you_ tell them?” I was more and more appalled.

“Everything in the light of Cavesword. You have no idea how many questions that does answer. Think about it and you’ll see what I mean. But of course we follow standard psychiatric procedure only it’s speeded up so that after a couple of visits there can be a practical and inspirational answer to their problems. Stokharin said he’d be happy to give it a try, but we haven’t yet worked out all the details.”

I didn’t want to hear anything more about this; I changed the subject. “What did you have in mind for me to do?”

“Cavesword applied to everyday life.” He spoke without hesitation; he had thought of everything. “We’ll know more what people want to hear after a few more telecasts, after more letters and so on. Then supply Cavesword where you can and, where you can’t, just use common sense and standard psychiatric procedure.”

“Even when they don’t always coincide?”

Paul roared with laughter. “Always the big knocker, Gene. That’s what I like about you ... the disapproving air ... it’s wonderful and I’m quite serious. People like myself ... visionaries, you might say, continually get their feet off the ground and it’s people like you who pull us back ... make us think. Anyway, I hope you’ll be able to get to it soon. We’ll have our end taken care of by the time the telecasts are over.”

“Will you show Cave to the world then? I mean in person?”

“I don’t know. By the way, we’re having a directors’ meeting Friday morning. You’ll get a notice in the mail. One of the things we’re going to take up is just that problem, so you be thinking about it in the meantime. I have a hunch it may be smart to keep him away from interviewers for good.”

“That’s impossible.”

“I’m not so sure. He’s pretty retiring except when he speaks. I don’t think he’d mind the isolation one bit. You see how dull he gets in company when he’s not performing.”

“Would he consent, do you think?”

“I think so. We could persuade him, I’m sure. Anyway, for now he’s a mystery man. Millions see him once a week but no one knows him except ourselves. A perfect state of affairs, if you ask me.”

“You mean there’s always a chance he might make a fool of himself if a tough interviewer got hold of him?”