My Dear Mrs. Bagley:I deeply regret that I am not there to greet you, but it was not possible. However, please understand that insofar as I am concerned, you were hired and have been drawing your salary from the date that I forwarded railroad fare and traveling expenses. Any face-to-face meeting is no more than a pleasantry, a formal introduction. It must not be considered in any way connected with the thought of a "Final Interview" or the process of "Closing the Deal."Please carry on as if you had been in charge long before I departed, or—considering my hermitlike habits—the way you would have carried on if I had not departed, but instead was still upstairs and hard at work with most definite orders that I was not to be disturbed for anything less important than total, personal disaster.I can offer you a word of explanation about young James. You will find him extraordinarily competent for a youngster of eight years. Were he less competent, I might have delayed my departure long enough to pass him literally from my supervision to yours. However, James is quite capable of taking care of himself; this fact you will appreciate fully long before you and I meet face-to-face.In the meantime, remember that our letters and the other references acquaint us with one another far better than a few short hours of personal contact.Sincerely,Charles Maxwell
My Dear Mrs. Bagley:
I deeply regret that I am not there to greet you, but it was not possible. However, please understand that insofar as I am concerned, you were hired and have been drawing your salary from the date that I forwarded railroad fare and traveling expenses. Any face-to-face meeting is no more than a pleasantry, a formal introduction. It must not be considered in any way connected with the thought of a "Final Interview" or the process of "Closing the Deal."
Please carry on as if you had been in charge long before I departed, or—considering my hermitlike habits—the way you would have carried on if I had not departed, but instead was still upstairs and hard at work with most definite orders that I was not to be disturbed for anything less important than total, personal disaster.
I can offer you a word of explanation about young James. You will find him extraordinarily competent for a youngster of eight years. Were he less competent, I might have delayed my departure long enough to pass him literally from my supervision to yours. However, James is quite capable of taking care of himself; this fact you will appreciate fully long before you and I meet face-to-face.
In the meantime, remember that our letters and the other references acquaint us with one another far better than a few short hours of personal contact.
Sincerely,Charles Maxwell
Sincerely,Charles Maxwell
"Well!" said Mrs. Bagley. "I don't know what to say."
Jimmy smiled. "You don't have to say anything," he said.
Mrs. Bagley looked at the youngster. "I don't think I like your Mr. Maxwell," she said.
"Why not?"
"He's practically shanghaied me here. He knows very well that I couldn't possibly leave you here all alone, no matter how I disliked the situation. He's practically forced me to stay."
James suppressed a smile. He said, "Mrs. Bagley, the way the trains run in and out of Shipmont, you're stuck for an overnight stay in any case."
"You don't seem to be perturbed."
"I'm not," he said.
Mrs. Bagley looked at James carefully. His size; his physique was precisely that of the eight-year-old boy. There was nothing malformed nor out-of-proportion; yet he spoke with an adult air of confidence.
"I am," she admitted.
"Perturbed? You needn't be," he said. "You've got to remember that writers are an odd lot. They don't conform. They don't punch time-clocks. They boast of having written a novel in three weeks but they don't mention the fact that they sat around drinking beer for six months plotting it."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning that Maxwell sees nothing wrong in attending to his own affairs and expecting you to attend to yours."
"But what shall I do?"
James smiled. "First, take a look around the house and satisfy yourself. You'll find the third floor shut off; the rooms up there are Maxwell's, and no one goes in but him. My bedroom is the big one in the front of the second floor. Pick yourself a room or a suite of rooms or move in all over the rest of the house. Build yourself a cup of tea and relax. Do as he says: Act as if you'd arrived before he took off, that you'd met and agreed verbally to do what you've already agreed to do by letter. Look at it from his point of view."
"What is his point of view?"
"He's a writer. He rented this house by mail. He banks by mail and shops by mail and makes his living by writing. Don't be surprised when he hires a housekeeper by mail and hands her the responsibility in writing. He lives by the written word."
Mrs. Bagley said, "In other words, the fact that he offered me a job in writing and I took it in writing—?"
"Writing," said James Holden soberly, "was invented for the express purpose of recording an agreement between two men in a permanent form that could be read by other men. The whole world runs on the theory that no one turns a hand until names are signed to written contracts—and here you sit, not happy because you weren't contracted-for by a personal chit-chat and a handshake."
Mrs. Bagley was taken aback slightly by this rather pointed criticism. What hurt was the fact that, generally speaking, it was true and especially the way he put it. The young man was too blunt, too out-spokenly direct. Obviously he needed someone around the place who wasn't the self-centered writer-type. And, Mrs. Bagley admitted to herself, there certainly was no evidence of evil-doing here.
No matter what, Charles Maxwell had neatly trapped her into staying by turning her own maternal responsibility against her.
"I'll get my bags," she said.
James Holden took a deep breath. He'd won this hurdle, so far so good. Now for the next!
Mrs. Bagley found life rather unhurried in the days that followed. She relaxed and tried to evaluate James Holden. To her unwarned mind, the boy was quite a puzzle.
There was no doubt about his eight years, except that he did not whoop and holler with the aimlessness of the standard eight-year-old boy. His vocabulary was far ahead of the eight-year-old and his speech was in adult grammar rather than halting. It was, she supposed, due to his constant adult company; children denied their contemporaries for playmates often take on attitudes beyond their years. Still, it was a bit on the too-superior side to please her. It was as if he were the result of over-indulgent parents who'd committed the mistake of letting the child know that their whole universe revolved about him.
Yet Maxwell's letters said that he was motherless, that he was not Maxwell's son. This indicated a probable history of broken homes and remarriages. Mrs. Bagley thought the problem over and gave it up. It was a home.
Things went on. They started warily but smoothly at first with Mrs. Bagley asking almost incessantly whether Mr. Maxwell would approve of this or that and should she do this or the other and, phrased cleverly, indicated that she would take the word of young James for the time being but there would be evil sputterings in the fireplace if the programs approved by young James Holden were not wholly endorsed by Mr. Charles Maxwell.
At the end of the first week, supplies were beginning to run short and still there was no sign of any return of the missing Mr. Maxwell. With some misgiving, Mrs. Bagley broached the subject of shopping to James. The youngster favored Mrs. Bagley with another smile.
"Yes," he said calmly. "Just a minute." And he disappeared upstairs to fetch another envelope. Inside was a second letter which read:
My Dear Mrs. Bagley:Attached you will find letters addressed to several of the local merchants in Shipmont, explaining your status as my housekeeper and directing them to honor your purchases against my accounts. Believe me, they recognize my signature despite the fact that they might not recognize me! There should be no difficulty. I'd suggest, however, that you start a savings account at the local bank with the enclosed salary check. You have no idea how much weight the local banker carries in his character-reference of folks with a savings account.Otherwise, I trust things are pleasant.Sincerely,Charles Maxwell.
My Dear Mrs. Bagley:
Attached you will find letters addressed to several of the local merchants in Shipmont, explaining your status as my housekeeper and directing them to honor your purchases against my accounts. Believe me, they recognize my signature despite the fact that they might not recognize me! There should be no difficulty. I'd suggest, however, that you start a savings account at the local bank with the enclosed salary check. You have no idea how much weight the local banker carries in his character-reference of folks with a savings account.
Otherwise, I trust things are pleasant.
Sincerely,Charles Maxwell.
Sincerely,Charles Maxwell.
"Things," she mused aloud, "are pleasant enough."
James nodded. "Good," he said. "You're satisfied, then?"
Mrs. Bagley smiled at him wistfully. "As they go," she said, "I'm satisfied. Lord knows, you're no great bother, James, and I'll be most happy to tell Mr. Maxwell so when he returns."
James nodded. "You're not concerned over Maxwell, are you?"
She sobered. "Yes," she said in a whisper. "Yes, I am. I'm afraid that he'll change things, that he'll not approve of Martha, or the way dinner is made, or my habits in dishwashing or bedmaking or marketing or something that will—well, put me right in the role of a paid chambermaid, a servant, a menial with no more to say about the running of the house, once he returns."
James Holden hesitated, thought, then smiled.
"Mrs. Bagley," he said apologetically, "I've thrown you a lot of curves. I hope you won't mind one more."
The woman frowned. James said hurriedly, "Oh, it's nothing bad, believe me. I mean—Well, you'll have to judge for yourself.
"You see, Mrs. Bagley," he said earnestly, "there isn't any Charles Maxwell."
Janet Bagley, with the look of a stricken animal, sat down heavily. There were two thoughts suddenly in her mind:Now I've got to leave, and,But I can't leave.
She sat looking at the boy, trying to make sense of what he had said. Mrs. Bagley was a young woman, but she had lived a demanding and unrelenting life; her husband dead, her finances calamitous, a baby to feed and raise ... there had been enough trouble in her life and she sought no more.
But she was also a woman of some strength of character.
Janet Bagley had not been able to afford much joy, but when things were at their worst she had not wept. She had been calm. She had taken what inexpensive pleasures she could secure—the health of her daughter, the strength of her arms to earn a living, the cunning of her mind to make a dollar do the work of five. She had learned that there was no bargain that was not worth investigating; the shoddiest goods were worth owning at a price; the least attractive prospect had to be faced and understood, for any commodity becomes a bargain when the price is right. There was no room for laziness or indulgence in her life. There was also no room for panic.
So Janet Bagley thought for a moment, and then said: "Tell me what you're talking about, James."
James Holden said immediately: "I am Charles Maxwell. That is, 'Charles Maxwell' is a pen name. He has no other existence."
"But—"
"But it's true, Mrs. Bagley," the boy said earnestly. "I'm only eight years old, but I happen to be earning my own living—as a writer, under the name of, among others, Charles Maxwell. Perhaps you've looked up some of the 'Charles Maxwell' books? If so, you may have seen some of the book reviews that were quoted on the jackets—I remember one that said that Charles Maxwell writes as though he himself were a boy, with the education of an adult. Well, that's the fact of the case."
Mrs. Bagley said slowly, "But I did look Mr. Max—I mean, I did look you up. There was a complete biographical sketch inWoman's Life. Thirty-one years old, I remember."
"I know. I wrote it. It too was fiction."
"You wrote—but why?"
"Because I was asked to write it," said James.
"But, well—what I mean, is—Just who is Mr. Maxwell? The man at the station said something about a hermit, but—"
"The Hermit of Martin's Hill is a convenient character carefully prepared to explain what might have looked like a very odd household," said James Holden. "Charles Maxwell, the Hermit, does not exist except in the minds of the neighbors and the editors of several magazines, and of course, the readers of those pages."
"But he wrote me himself." The bewildered woman paused.
"That's right, Mrs. Bagley. There's absolutely nothing illegal about a writer's using a pen name. Absolutely nothing. Some writers become so well-known by their pseudonym that they answer when someone calls them. So long as the writer isn't wanted by the F.B.I. for some heinous crime, and so long as he can unscramble the gobbledygook on Form 1040, stay out of trouble, pay his rent, and make his regular contributions to Social Security, nobody cares what name he uses."
"But where are your parents? Have you no friends? No legal guardian? Who handles your business affairs?"
James said in a flat tone of recital, "My parents are dead. What friends and family I have, want to turn me over to my legal guardian. My legal guardian is the murderer of my parents and the would-have-been murderer of me if I hadn't been lucky. Someday I shall prove it. And I handle my affairs myself, by mail, as you well know. I placed the advertisement, wrote the letters of reply, wrote those letters that answered specific questions and asked others, and I wrote the check that you cashed in order to buy your railroad ticket, Mrs. Bagley. No, don't worry. It's good."
Mrs. Bagley tried to digest all that and failed. She returned to the central point. "But you're a minor—"
"I am," admitted James Holden. "But you accepted my checks, your bank accepted my checks, and they've been honored by the clearing houses. My own bank has been accepting them for a couple of years now. It will continue to be that way until something goes wrong and I'm found out. I'm taking every precaution that nothing goes wrong."
"Still—"
"Mrs. Bagley, look at me. I am precisely what I seem to be. I am a young male human being, eight years old, possessed of a good command of the English language and an education superior to the schooling of any high-school graduate. It is true that I am an infant in the eyes of the law, so I have not the right to hold the ear of the law long enough to explain my competence."
"But—"
"Listen a moment," insisted James. "You can't hope to hear it all in one short afternoon. It may take weeks before you fully understand."
"You assume that I'll stay, then?"
James smiled. Not the wide open, simple smile of youth but the knowing smile of someone pleased with the success of his own plans. "Mrs. Bagley, of the many replies to my advertisement, yours was selected because you are in a near-desperate position. My advertisement must have sounded tailor-made to fit your case; a young widow to work as resident housekeeper, child of preschool or early school age welcome. Well, Mrs. Bagley, your qualifications are tailor-made for me, too. You are in need, and I can give you what you need—a living salary, a home for you and your daughter, and for your daughter an education that will far transcend any that you could ever provide for her."
"And how do you intend to make that come to pass?"
"Mrs. Bagley, at the present time there are only two people alive who know the answer to that question. I am one of them. The other is my so-called legal 'guardian' who would be most happy to guard me right out of my real secret. You will be the third person alive to know that my mother and father built a machine that produces the same deeply-inlaid memory-track of information as many months of learning-by-repetition. With that machine, I absorbed the information available to a high-school student before I was five. I am rebuilding that machine now from plans and specifications drilled into my brain by my father. When it is complete, I intend to become the best informed person in the world."
"That isn't right," breathed Mrs. Bagley.
"Isn't it?" asked James seriously. "Isn't it right? Is it wrong, when at the present time it takes a man until he is almost thirty years old before he can say that his education is complete?"
"Well, I suppose you're right."
James eyed Mrs. Bagley carefully. He said softly, "Mrs. Bagley, tell me, would you give Martha a college education if you had—or will you if you have at the time—the wherewithal to provide it?"
"Of course."
"You have it here," said James. "So long as you stay to protect it."
"But won't it make—?" her voice trailed away uncertainly.
"A little intellectual monster out of her?" laughed the boy. "Maybe. Maybe I am, too. On the other hand it might make a brilliant woman out of her. She might be a doctor if she has the capacity of a brilliant doctor. My father's machine is no monster-maker, Mrs. Bagley. With it a person could memorize the Britannica. And from the Britannica that person would learn that there is much good in the world and also that there is rich reward for being a part of that capacity for good."
"I seem to have been outmaneuvered," said Mrs. Bagley with a worried frown.
James smiled. "Not at all," he said. "It was just a matter of finding someone who wanted desperately to have what I wanted to give, and of course overcoming the natural adult reluctance to admit that anybody my size and age can operate on grown-up terms."
"You sound so sure of yourself."
"I am sure of myself. And one of the more important things in life is to understand one's limitations."
"But couldn't you convince them—?"
"One—you—I can convince. Maybe another, later. But if I tackle the great American public, I'm licked by statistics. My guess is that there is one brand-new United States citizen born every ten seconds. It takes me longer than ten seconds to convince someone, that I know what I'm talking about. But so long as I have an accepted adult out front, running the store, I don't have to do anything but sit backstage, run the hidden strings, and wait until my period of growth provides me with a stature that won't demand any explanation."
From the playroom, Martha came running. "Mummy! Mummy!" she cried in a shrill voice filled with the strident tones of alarm, "Dolly's sick and I can't leave her!"
Mrs. Bagley folded her daughter in her arms. "We won't leave," she said. "We're staying."
James Holden nodded with satisfaction, but one thing he realized then and there: He simply had to rush the completion of his father's machine.
He could not stand the simpering prattle of Martha Bagley's playgames.
The arrival of Mrs. Bagley changed James Holden's way of life far more than he'd expected. His basic idea had been to free himself from the hours of dishwashing, bedmaking, dusting, cleaning and straightening and from the irking chore of planning his meals far enough ahead to obtain sustenance either through mail or carried note. He gave up his haphazard chores readily. Mrs. Bagley's menus often served him dishes that he wouldn't have given house-room; but he also enjoyed many meals that he could not or would not have taken the time to prepare.
He did have some faint notion that being freed from the household toil would allow him sixteen or eighteen hours at the typewriter, but he was not greatly dismayed to find that this did not work.
When he wrote himself out, he relaxed by reading, or sitting quietly planning his next piece. Even that did not fill his entire day. To take some advantage of his time, James began to indulge in talk-fests with Mrs. Bagley.
These were informative. He was learning from her how the outside world was run, from one who had no close association with his own former life. Mrs. Bagley was by no means well-informed on all sides of life, but she did have her opinions and her experiences and a fair idea of how things went on in her own level. And, of course, James had made this choice because of the girl. He wanted a companion of his own age. Regardless of what Mrs. Bagley really thought of this matter of rapid education, James proposed to use it on Martha. That would give him a companion of his own like, they would come closer to understanding one another than he could ever hope to find understanding elsewhere.
So he talked and played with Martha in his moments of relaxation. And he found her grasp of life completely unreal.
James could not get through to her. He could not make her stop play-acting in everything that she did not ignore completely. It worried him.
With the arrival of summer, James and Martha played outside in the fresh air. They made a few shopping excursions into town, walking the mile and more by taking their time, and returning with their shopping load in the station-master's taxicab mail car. But on these expeditions, James hung close to Martha lest her babbling prattle start an unwelcome line of thought. She never did it, but James was forever on edge.
This source of possible danger drove him hard. The machine that was growing in a mare's-nest on the second floor began to evolve faster.
James Holden's work was a strangely crude efficiency. The prototype had been built by his father bit by bit and step by step as its design demanded. Sections were added as needed, and other sections believed needed were abandoned as the research showed them unnecessary. Louis Holden had been a fine instrumentation engineer, but his first models were hay-wired in the breadboard form. James copied his father's work—including his father's casual breadboard style. And he added some inefficiencies of his own.
Furthermore, James was not strong enough to lift the heavier assemblies into place. James parked the parts wherever they would sit.
To Mrs. Bagley, the whole thing was bizarre and unreasonable. Given her opinion, with no other evidence, she would have rejected the idea at once. She simply did not understand anything of a technical nature.
One day she bluntly asked him how he knew what he was doing.
James grinned. "I reallydon'tknow what I'm doing," he admitted. "I'm only following some very explicit directions. If I knew the pure theory of my father's machine I could not design the instrumentation that would make it work. But I can build a reproduction of my father's machine from the directions."
"How can that be?"
James stopped working and sat on a packing case. "If you bought a lawn-mower," he said, "it might come neatly packed in a little box with all the parts nested in cardboard formers and all the little nuts and bolts packed in a bag. There would be a set of assembly directions, written in such a way as to explain to anybody who can read that Part A is fastened to Bracket B using Bolt C, Lockwasher D, and Nut E. My father's one and only recognition of the dangers of the unforeseeable future was to drill deep in my brain these directions. For instance," and he pointed to a boxed device, "that thing is an infra-low frequency amplifier. Now, I haven't much more than a faint glimmer of what the thing is and how it differs from a standard amplifier, but I know that it must be built precisely thus-and-so, and finally it must be fitted into the machine per instructions. Look, Mrs. Bagley." James picked up a recently-received package, swept a place clear on the packing case and dumped it out. It disgorged several paper bags of parts, some large plates and a box. He handed her a booklet. "Try it yourself," he said. "That's a piece of test equipment made in kit form by a commercial outfit in Michigan. Follow those directions and build it for me."
"But I don't know anything about this sort of thing."
"You can read," said James with a complete lack of respect. He turned back to his own work, leaving Mrs. Bagley leafing her way through the assembly manual.
To the woman it was meaningless. But as she read, a secondary thought rose in her mind. James was building this devilish-looking nightmare, and he had every intention of using it on her daughter! She accepted without understanding the fact that James Holden's superior education had come of such a machine—but it had been a machine built by a competent mechanic. She stole a look at James. The anomaly puzzled her.
When the lad talked, his size and even the thin boyish voice were negated by the intelligence of his words, the size of his vocabulary, the clarity of his statements. Now that he was silent, he became no more than an eight-year-old lad who could not possibly be doing anything constructive with this mad array of equipment. The messiness of the place merely made the madness of the whole program seem worse.
But she turned back to her booklet. Maybe James was right. If she could assemble this doodad without knowing the first principle of its operation, without even knowing from the name what the thing did, then she might be willing to admit that—messy as it looked—the machine could be reconstructed.
Trapped by her own interest, Mrs. Bagley pitched in.
They took a week off to rearrange the place. They built wooden shelves to hold the parts in better order. These were by no means the work of a carpenter, for Mrs. Bagley's aim with a saw was haphazard, and her batting average with a hammer was about .470; but James lacked the strength, so the construction job was hers. Crude as it was, the place looked less like a junkshop when they were done. Work resumed on the assembly of the educator.
Of course the writing suffered.
The budget ran low. James was forced to abandon the project for his typewriter. He drove himself hard, fretting and worrying himself into a stew time after time. And then as August approached, Nature stepped in to add more disorder.
James entered a "period of growth." In three weeks he gained two inches.
His muscles, his bones and his nervous system ceased to coordinate. He became clumsy. His handwriting underwent a change, so severe that James had to practically forge his own signature of Charles Maxwell. To avoid trouble he stopped the practice of writing individual checks for the bills and transferred a block sum of money to an operating account in Mrs. Bagley's name.
His fine regimen went to pieces.
He embarked on a haphazard program of sleeping, eating and working at odd hours, and his appetite became positively voracious. He wanted what he wanted when he wanted it, even if it were the middle of the night. He pouted and groused when he didn't get it. In calmer moments he hated himself for these tantrums, but no amount of self-rationalization stopped them.
During this period, James was by no means an efficient youngster. His writing suffered the ills of both his period of growth and his upset state of mind. His fingers failed to coordinate on his typewriter and his manuscript copy turned out rough, with strikeovers, xxx-outs, and gross mistakes. The pile of discarded paper massed higher than his finished copy until Mrs. Bagley took over and began to retype his rough script for him.
His state of mind remained chaotic.
Mrs. Bagley began to treat him with special care. She served him warm milk and insisted that he rest. Finally she asked him why he drove himself so hard.
"We are approaching the end of summer," he said, "and we are not prepared."
"Prepared for what?"
They were relaxing in the living room, James fretting and Mrs. Bagley seated, Martha Bagley asprawl on the floor turning the pages of a crayon-coloring book. "Look at us," he said. "I am a boy of eight, your daughter is a girl of seven. By careful dress and action I could pass for a child one year younger, but that would still make me seven. Last summer when I was seven, I passed for six."
"Yes, but—?"
"Mrs. Bagley, there are laws about compulsory education. Sooner or later someone is going to get very curious about us."
"What do you intend to do about it?"
"That's the problem," he said. "I don't really know. With a lot of concentrated effort I can probably enter school if I have to, and keep my education covered up. But Martha is another story."
"I don't see—?" Mrs. Bagley bit her lip.
"We can't permit her to attend school," said James.
"You shouldn't have advertised for a woman with a girl child!" said Mrs. Bagley.
"Perhaps not. But I wanted someone of my own age and size around so that we can grow together. I'm a bit of a misfit until I'm granted the right to use my education as I see fit."
"And you hope to make Martha another misfit?"
"If you care to put it that way," admitted James. "Someone has to start. Someday all kids will be educated with my machine and then there'll be no misfits."
"But until then—?"
"Mrs. Bagley, I am not worried about what is going to happen next year. I am worried about what is going to happen next month."
Mrs. Bagley sat and watched him for a moment. This boy was worried, she could see that. But assuming that any part of his story was true—and it was impossible to doubt it—he had ample cause.
The past years had given Mrs. Bagley a hard shell because it was useful for survival; to keep herself and her child alive she had had to be permanently alert for every threat. Clearly this was a threat. Martha was involved. Martha's future was, at the least, bound to be affected by what James did.
And the ties of blood and habit made Martha's future the first consideration in Janet Bagley's thoughts.
But not the only consideration; for there is an in-born trait in the human race which demands that any helpless child should be helped. James was hardly helpless; but he certainly was a child. It was easy to forget it, talking to him—until something came up that the child could not handle.
Mrs. Bagley sighed. In a different tone she asked, "What did you do last year?"
"Played with Rags on the lawn," James said promptly. "A boy and his dog is a perfectly normal sight—in the summer. Then, when school opened, I stayed in the house as much as I could. When I had to go out I tried to make myself look younger. Short pants, dirty face. I don't think I could get away with it this year."
"I think you're right," Mrs. Bagley admitted. "Well, suppose you could do what you wish this year? What would that be?"
James said: "I want to get my machine working. Then I want to use it on Martha."
"On Martha! But—"
James said patiently: "It won't hurt her, Mrs. Bagley. There isn't any other way. The first thing she needs is a good command of English."
"English?" Mrs. Bagley hesitated, and was lost. After all, what was wrong with the girl's learning proper speech?
"Martha is a child both physically and intellectually. She has been talked to about 'right' and 'wrong' and she knows that 'telling the truth' is right, but she doesn't recognize that talking about fairies is a misstatement of the truth. Question her carefully about how we live, and you'll get a fair approximation of the truth."
"So?"
"But suppose someone asks Martha about the Hermit of Martin's Hill?"
"What do you fear?"
"We might play upon her make-believe stronger than we have. She play-acts his existence very well. But suppose someone asks her what he eats, or where he gets his exercise, or some other personal question. She hasn't the command of logic to improvise a convincing background."
"But why should anybody ask such personal questions?" asked Mrs. Bagley.
James said patiently: "To ask personal questions of an adult is 'prying' and is therefore considered improper and antisocial. To ask the same questions of a child is proper and social. It indicates a polite interest in the world of the child. You and I, Mrs. Bagley, have a complete picture of the Hermit all prepared, and with our education we can improvise plausible answers. I've hoped to finish my machine early enough to provide Martha with the ability to do the same."
"So what can we do?"
"About the only thing we can do is to hide," said James. "Luckily, most of the business is conducted out of this place by mail. Write letters to some boarding school situated a good many miles from here. Ask the usual routine questions about entering a seven-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy for one semester. Robert Holmes, our postmaster-taxicab driver-station-master, reads everything that isn't sealed. He will read the addresses, and he will see replies and read their return address."
"And then we'll pretend to send you and Martha to boarding school?"
James nodded. "Confinement is going to be difficult, but in this climate the weather gets nasty early and that keeps people out of one another's hair."
"But this station-master business—?"
"We've got to pull some wool over Robert's eyes," said James. "Somehow, we've got to make it entirely plausible. You've got to take Martha and me away and come back alone just as if we were in school."
"We should have a car," said Mrs. Bagley.
"A car is one piece of hardware that I could never justify," said James. "Nor," he chuckled, "buy from a mail-order house because I couldn't accept delivery. I bought furniture from Sears and had it delivered according to mailed instructions. But I figured it better to have the folks in Shipmont wondering why Charles Maxwell didn't own a car than to have them puzzling why he owned one that never was used, nor even moved. Besides, a car—costs—"
Mrs. Bagley smiled with real satisfaction. "There," she said, "I think I can help. I can buy the car."
James was startled. "But can you afford it?"
Mrs. Bagley nodded seriously. "James," she said, "I've been scratching out an existence on hard terms and I've had to make sure of tomorrow. Even when things were worst, I tried to put something away—some weeks it was only a few pennies, sometimes nothing at all. But—well, I'm not afraid of tomorrow any more."
James was oddly pleased. While he was trying to find a way to say it, Mrs. Bagley relieved him of the necessity. "It won't be a brand-new convertible," she warned. "But they tell me you can get something that runs for two or three hundred dollars. Tim Fisher has some that look about right in his garage—and besides," she said, clinching it, "it gives me a chance to give out a little more Maxwell and boarding-school propaganda."
The letter was a masterpiece of dissembling. It suggested, without promising, that Charles Maxwell intended to send his young charge to boarding school along with his housekeeper's daughter. It asked the school's advice and explained the deformity that made Charles Maxwell a recluse. The reply could hardly have been better if they'd penned it themselves for the signature of the faculty advisor. It discussed the pros and cons of away-from-home schooling and went on at great length to discuss the attitude of children and their upbringing amid strange surroundings. It invited a long and inconclusive correspondence—just what James wanted.
The supposed departure for school went off neatly, no one in the town of Shipmont was surprised when Mrs. Bagley turned up buying an automobile of several years' vintage because this was a community where everybody had one.
The letters continued at the rate of one every two or three weeks. They were picked up by Mrs. Bagley who let it be known that these were progress reports. In reality, they were little tracts on the theory of child education. They kept up the correspondence for the information it contained, and also because Mrs. Bagley enjoyed this contact with an outer world that contained adults.
Meanwhile, James ended his spurt of growth and settled down. Work on his machine continued when he could afford to buy the parts, and his writing settled down into a comfortable channel once more. In his spare time James began to work on Martha's diction.
Martha could not have been called a retarded child. Her trouble was lack of constant parental attention during her early years. With father gone and mother struggling to live, Martha had never overcome some of the babytalk-diction faults. There was still a trace of the omitted 'B' here and there. 'Y' was a difficult sound; the color of a lemon was "Lellow." Martha's English construction still bore marks of the baby. "Do you have to—" came out as "Does you has to—?"
James Holden's father had struggled in just this way through his early experimental days, when he despaired of ever getting the infant James out of the baby-prattle stage. He could not force, he could not even coerce. All that his father could do was to watch quietly as baby James acquired the awareness of things. Then he could step in and supply the correct word-sound to name the object. In those early days the progress of James Holden was no greater than the progress of any other infant. Holden Senior followed the theory of ciphers; no cryptologist can start unravelling a secret message until he is aware of the fact that some hidden message exists. No infant can be taught a language until some awareness tells the tiny brain that there is some definite connection between sound and sight.
For the next few weeks James worked with Martha on her speech, and hated it. So slow, so dreary! But it was necessary, he thought, to keep her from establishing any more permanent errors, so that when the machine was ready there would be at least a blank slate to write on, not one all scribbled over with mistakes.
Time passed; the weather grew colder; the machine spread its scattered parts over his workroom.
Janet Bagley knew that the machine was growing, but it had not occurred to her that it would be finished. She had grown accustomed to her life on Martin's Hill. By her standards, it was easy. She made three meals each day, cleaned the rooms, hung curtains, sewed clothing for Martha and herself, did the shopping and had time enough left over to take excursions in her little car and keep her daughter out of mischief. It was pleasant. It was more than pleasant, it was safe.
And then the machine was finished.
Mrs. Bagley took a sandwich and a glass of milk to James and found him sitting on a chair, a heavy headset covering most of his skull, reading aloud from a textbook on electronic theory.
Mrs. Bagley stopped at the door, unaccountably startled.
James looked up and shut off his work. "It's finished," he said with grave pride.
"All of it?"
"Well," he said, pondering, "the basic part. It works."
Mrs. Bagley looked at the scramble of equipment in the room as though it were an enemy. It didn't look finished. It didn't even look safe. But she trusted James, although she felt at that moment that she would grow old and die before she understood why and how any collection of apparatus could be functional and still be so untidy. "It—could teach me?"
"If you had something you want to memorize."
"I'd like to memorize some of the pet recipes from my cookbook."
"Get it," directed James.
She hesitated. "How does it work?" she wanted to know first.
He countered with another question. "How do we memorize anything?"
She thought. "Why, by repeating and repeating and rehearsing and rehearsing."
"Yes," said James. "So this device does the repetition for you. Electromechanically."
"But how?"
James smiled wistfully. "I can give you only a thumbnail sketch," he said, "until I have had time to study the subjects that lead up to the final theory."
"Goodness," exclaimed Mrs. Bagley, "all I want is a brief idea. I wouldn't understand the principles at all."
"Well, then, my mother, as a cerebral surgeon, knew the anatomy of the human brain. My father, as an instrument-maker, designed and built encephalographs. Together, they discovered that if the great waves of the brain were filtered down and the extremely minute waves that ride on top of them were amplified, the pattern of these superfine waves went through convolutions peculiar to certain thoughts. Continued research refined their discovery.
"Now, the general theory is that the cells of the brain act sort of like a binary digital computer, with certain banks of cells operating to store sufficient bits of information to furnish a complete memory. In the process of memorization, individual cells become activated and linked by the constant repetition.
"Second, the brain within the skull is a prisoner, connected to the 'outside' by the five standard sensory channels of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Stimulate a channel, and the result is a certain wave-shape of electrical impulse that enters the brain and—sort of like the key to a Yale lock—fits only one combination of cells. Or if no previous memory is there, it starts its own new collection of cells to linking and combining. When we repeat and repeat, we are deepening the groove, so to speak.
"Finally comes the Holden Machine. The helmet makes contact with the skull in those spots where the probes of the encephalograph are placed. When the brain is stimulated into thought, the brain waves are monitored and recorded, amplified, and then fed back to the same brain-spots. Not once, but multifold, like the vibration of a reed or violin string. The circuit that accepts signals, amplifies them, returns them to the same set of terminals, and causes them to be repeated several hundred times per millisecond without actually ringing or oscillating is the real research secret of the machine. My father's secret and now mine."
"And how do we use it?"
"You want to memorize a list of ingredients," said James. "So you will put this helmet on your head with the cookbook in your hands. You will turn on the machine when you have read the part you want to memorize just to be sure of your material. Then, with the machine running, you carefully read aloud the passage from your book. The vibrating amplifier in the machine monitors and records each electrical impulse, then furnishes it back to your brain as a successive series of repetitious vibrations, each identical in shape and magnitude, just as if you had actually read and re-read that list of stuff time and again."
"And then I'll know it cold?"
James shook his head. "Then you'll be about as confused as you've ever been. For several hours, none of it will make sense. You'll be thinking things like a 'cup of salt and a pinch of water,' or maybe, 'sugar three of mustard and two spoonthree teas.' And then in a few hours all of this mish-mash will settle itself down into the proper serial arrangement; it will fit the rest of your brain-memory-pattern comfortably."
"Why?"
"I don't know. It has something to do with the same effect one gets out of studying. On Tuesday one can read a page of textbook and not grasp a word of it. Successive readings help only a little. Then in about a week it all becomes quite clear, just as if the brain had sorted it and filed it logically among the other bits of information. Well, what about that cookbook?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Bagley, with the air of someone agreeing to have a tooth pulled when it hasn't really started to hurt, "I'll get it."
James Holden allowed himself a few pleasant daydreams. The most satisfactory of all was one of himself pleading his own case before the black-robed Justices of the Supreme Court, demolishing his detractors with a flow of his brilliance and convincing them beyond any doubt that he did indeed have the right to walk alone. That there be no question of his intellect, James proposed to use his machine to educate himself to completion. He would be the supreme student of the arts and the sciences, of law, language, and literature. He would know history and the humanities, and the dreams and aims of the great philosophers and statesmen, and he would even be able to quote in their own terms the drives of the great dictators and some of the evil men so that he could draw and compare to show that he knew the difference between good and bad.
But James Holden had no intention of sharing this limelight.
His superb brilliance was to be compared to the average man's, not to another one like him. He had the head start. He intended to keep it until he had succeeded in compelling the whole world to accept him with the full status of a free adult.
Then, under his guidance, he would permit the world-wide use of his machine.
His loneliness had forced him to revise that dream by the addition of Martha Bagley; he needed a companion, contemporary, and foil. His mental playlet no longer closed with James Holden standing alone before the Bench. Now it ended with Martha saying proudly, "James, I knew you could do it."
Martha Bagley's brilliance would not conflict with his. He could stay ahead of her forever. But he had no intention of allowing some experienced adult to partake of this program of enforced education. He was, therefore, going to find himself some manner or means of preventing Mrs. Bagley from running the gamut of all available information.
James Holden evaluated all people in his own terms, he believed that everybody was just as eager for knowledge as he was.
So he was surprised to find that Mrs. Bagley's desire for extended education only included such information as would make her own immediate personal problems easier. Mrs. Bagley was the first one of the mass of people James was destined to meet who not only did not know how or why things worked, but further had no intention whatsoever of finding out.
Instead of trying to monopolize James Holden's machine, Mrs. Bagley was satisfied to learn a number of her pet recipes. After a day of thought she added her social security number, blood type, some birthdays, dates, a few telephone numbers and her multiplication tables. She announced that she was satisfied. It solved James Holden's problem—and stunned him completely.
But James had very little time to worry about Mrs. Bagley's attitude. He found his hands full with Martha.
Martha played fey. Her actions and attitude baffled James, and even confused her mother. There was no way of really determining whether the girl was scared to death of the machine itself, or whether she simply decided to be difficult. And she uttered the proper replies with all of the promptness—and intelligence—of a ventriloquist's dummy:
"You don't want to be ignorant, do you?"
"No."
"You want to be smart, like James, don't you?"
"Yes."
"You know the machine won't hurt, don't you?"
"Yes."
"Then let's try it just once, please?"
"No."
Back to the beginning again. Martha would agree to absolutely anything except the educator.
Leaving the argument to Mrs. Bagley, James sat down angrily with a book. He was so completely frustrated that he couldn't read, but he sat there leafing the pages slowly and making a determined show of not lifting his head.
Mrs. Bagley went on for another hour before she reached the end of her own patience. She stood up almost rigid with anger. James never knew how close Mrs. Bagley was to making use of a hairbrush on her daughter's bottom. But Mrs. Bagley also realized that Martha had to go into this process willing to cooperate. So, instead of physical punishment, she issued a dictum:
"You'll go to your room and stay there until you're willing!"
And at that point Martha ceased being stubborn and began playing games.
She permitted herself to be led to the chair, and then went through a routine of skittishness, turning her head and squirming incessantly, which made it impossible for James to place the headset properly. This went on until he stalked away and sat down again. Immediately Martha sat like a statue. But as soon as James reached for the little screws that adjusted the electrodes, Martha started to giggle and squirm. He stalked away and sat through another session between Martha and her mother.
Late in the afternoon James succeeded in getting her to the machine; Martha uttered a sentence without punctuating it with little giggles, but it came as elided babytalk.
"Again," he commanded.
"I don't wan' to."
"Again!" he snapped.
Martha began to cry.
That, to James, was the end. But Mrs. Bagley stepped forward with a commanding wave for James to vacate the premises and took over. James could not analyze her expression, but it did look as if it held relief. He left the room to them; a half hour later Mrs. Bagley called him back.
"She's had it," said Mrs. Bagley. "Now you can start, I think."
James looked dubious; but said, "Read this."
"Martha?"
Martha took a deep breath and said, nicely, "'A' is the first letter of the English Alphabet."
"Good." He pressed the button. "Again? Please?"
Martha recited it nicely.
"Fine," he said. "Now we'll look up 'Is' and go on from there."
"My goodness," said Mrs. Bagley, "this is going to take months."
"Not at all," said James. "It just goes slowly at the start. Most of the definitions use the same words over and over again. Martha really knows most of these simple words, we've just got to be dead certain that her own definition of them agrees wholly and completely with ours. After a couple of hours of this minute detail, we'll be skipping over everything but new words. After all, she only has to work them over once, and as we find them, we'll mark them out of the book. Ready, Martha?"
"Can't read it."
James took the little dictionary. "Um," he said. "Hadn't occurred to me."
"What?" asked Mrs. Bagley.
"This thing says, Three-rd pers period sing periodic indic period of Be,' the last in heavy bold type. Can't have Martha talking in abbreviations," he chuckled. He went to the typewriter and wrote it out fully. "Now read that," he directed.
She did and again the process went through without a hitch. Slowly, but surely, they progressed for almost two hours before Martha rebelled. James stopped, satisfied with the beginning.
But as time wore on into the late autumn, Martha slowly—oh, so slowly!—began to realize that there was importance to getting things right. She continued to tease. But she did her teasing before James closed the "Run" button.
Once James progressed Martha through the little dictionary, he began with a book of grammar. Again it started slowly; he had to spend quite a bit of time explaining to Martha that she did indeed know all of the terms used in the book of grammar because they'd all been defined by the dictionary, now she was going to learn how the terms and their definitions were used.
James was on more familiar ground now. James, like Martha, had learned his first halting sentence structure by mimicking his parents, but he remembered the process of learning why and how sentences are constructed according to the rules, and how the rules are used rather than intuition in forming sentences.
Grammar was a topic that could not be taken in snippets and bits. Whole paragraphs had to be read until Martha could read them without a halt or a mispronunciation, and then committed to memory with the "Run" button held down. At the best it was a boring process, even though it took only minutes instead of days. It was not conflicting, but it was confusing. It installed permanently certain solid blocks of information that were isolated; they stood alone until later blocks came in to connect them into a whole area.
Each session was numbing. Martha could take no more than a couple of hours, after which her reading became foggy. She wanted a nap after each session and even after the nap she went around in a bemused state of mental dizziness.
Life settled down once more in the House on Martin's Hill. James worked with the machine himself and laid out lessons to guide Martha. Then, finished for the day with education, James took to his typewriter while Martha had her nap. It filled the days of the boy and girl completely.
This made an unexpected and pleasant change in Mrs. Bagley's routine. It had been a job to keep Martha occupied. Now that Martha was busy, Mrs. Bagley found time on her own hands; without interruption, her housework routine was completed quite early in the afternoon.
Mrs. Bagley had never made any great point of getting dressed for dinner. She accumulated a collection of house-frocks; printed cotton washables differing somewhat in color and cut but functionally identical. She wore them serially as they came from the row of hangers in her closet.
Now she began to acquire some dressier things, wearing them even during her shopping trips.
James paid little attention to this change in his housekeeper's routine, but he approved. Mrs. Bagley was also taking more pains with the 'do' of her hair, but the boy's notice was not detailed enough to take a part-by-section inventory of the whole. In fact, James gave the whole matter very little thought until Mrs. Bagley made a second change after her return from town, appearing for dinner in what James could only classify as a party dress.
She asked, "James, do you mind if I go out this evening?"
James, startled, shrugged and said, "No, I guess not."
"You'll keep an ear out for Martha?"
The need for watching a sleeping girl of seven and a half did not penetrate. "What's up?" he asked.
"It's been months since I saw a movie."
James shrugged again, puzzled. "You saw the 'Bride of Frankenstein' last night on TV," he pointed out.
"I first saw that old horror when I was about your age," she told him with a trace of disdain.
"I liked it."
"So did I at eight and a half. But tonight I'm going to see anewpicture."
"Okay," said James, wondering why anybody in their right mind would go out on a chilly night late in November just to see a moving picture when they could stay at home and watch one in comfort. "Have a good time."
He expected Mrs. Bagley to take off in her car, but she did not. She waited until a brieftoot! came from the road. Then, with a swirl of motion, she left.
It took James Holden's limited experience some little time to identify the event with some similar scenes from books he'd read; even with him, reading about it was one world and seeing it happen was another thing entirely.
For James Holden it opened a new area for contemplation. He would have to know something about this matter if he hoped to achieve his dreamed-of status as an adult.
Information about the relation between man and woman had not been included in the course of education devised by his father and mother. Therefore his physical age and his information on the delicate subject were approximately parallel.
His personal evaluation of the subject was uncomplicated. At some age not much greater than his own, boys and girls conglomerated in a mass that milled around in a constant state of flux and motion, like individual atoms of gas compressed in a container. Meetings and encounters took place both singly and in groups until nearly everybody had been in touch with almost everybody else. Slowly the amorphous mass changed. Groups became attracted by mutual interests. Changes and exchanges took place, and then a pair-formation began to take place. The pair-formation went through its interchanges both with and without friction as the settling-down process proceeded. At times predictable by comparing it to the statistics of radioactivity, the pair-production resulted in permanent combination, which effectively removed this couple from free circulation.
James Holden had no grasp or feeling for the great catalyst that causes this pair-production; he saw it only for its sheer mechanics. To him, the sensible way to go about this matter was to get there early and move fast, because one stands to make a better choice when there is a greater number of unattached specimens from which to choose. Those left over are likely to have flaws.
And so he pondered, long after Martha had gone to bed.
He was still up and waiting when he heard the car stop at the gate. He watched them come up the walk arm in arm, their stride slow and lingering. They paused for several moments on the doorstep, once there was a short, muted laugh. The snick of the key came next and they came into the hallway.
"No, please don't come in," said Mrs. Bagley.
"But—" replied the man.
"But me no buts. It's late, Tim."
Tim? Tim? That would probably be Timothy Fisher. He ran the local garage where Mrs. Bagley bought her car. James went on listening shamelessly.
"Late? Phooey. When is eleven-thirty late?"
"When it's right now," she replied with a light laugh. "Now, Tim. It's been very—"
There came a long silence.
Her voice was throaty when the silence broke. "Now, will you go?"
"Of course," he said.
"Not that way, silly," she said. "The door's behind you."
"Isn't the door I want," he chuckled.
"We're making enough noise to wake the dead," she complained.
"Then let's stop talking," he told her.
There was another long silence.
"Now please go."
"Can I come back tomorrow night?"
"Not tomorrow."
"Friday?"
"Saturday."
"It's a date, then."
"All right. Now get along with you."
"You're cruel and heartless, Janet," he complained. "Sending a man out in that cold and storm."
"It isn't storming, and you've a fine heater in that car of yours."
"I'd rather have you."
"Do you tell that to all the girls?"
"Sure. Even Maggie the Washerwoman is better than an old car heater."
Mrs. Bagley chuckled throatily. "How is Maggie?"
"She's fine."
"I mean as a date."
"Better than the car heater."
"Tim, you're a fool."
"When I was a kid," said Tim reflectively, "there used to be a female siren in the movies. Her pet line used to be 'Kiss me, my fool!' Theda Bara, I think. Before talkies. Now—"
"No, Tim—"
Another long silence.
"Now, Tim, you've simplygotto go!"
"Yeah, I know. You've convinced me."
"Then why aren't you going?"
He chuckled. "Look, you've convinced me. I can't stay so I'll go, obviously. But now that we've covered this problem, let's drop the subject for a while, huh?"
"Don't spoil a fine evening, Tim."
"Janet, what's with you, anyway?"
"What do you mean, 'what's with me?'"
"Just this. Somewhere up in the house is this oddball Maxwell who hides out all the time. He's either asleep or busy. Anyway, he isn't here. Do you have to report in, punch a time clock, tuck him in—or do you turn into a pumpkin at the stroke of twelve?"
"Mr. Maxwell is paying me wages to keep house for him. That's all. Part of my wages is my keep. But it doesn't entitle me to have full run of the house or to bring guests in at midnight for a two-hour good-night session."
"I'd like to tell this bird a thing or two," said Tim Fisher sharply. "He can't keep you cooped up like—like—"
"Nobody is keeping me cooped up," she said. "Like what?"
"What?"
"You said 'like—'"
"Skip it. What I meant is that you can't moulder, Janet. You've got to get out and meet people."
"I've been out and I've met people. I've met you."
"All to the good."
"Fine. So you invited me out, and I went. It was fun. I liked it. You've asked me, and I've said that I'd like to do it again on Saturday. I've enjoyed being kissed, and I'll probably enjoy it again on Saturday. So—"
"I'd think you'd enjoy a lot of it."
"Because my husband has been gone for five years?"
"Oh, now Janet—"
"That's what you meant, isn't it?"
"No. You've got me wrong."
"Tim, stop it. You're spoiling a fine evening. You should have gone before it started to spoil. Now please put your smile on again and leave cheerfully. There's always Saturday—if you still want it."
"I'll call you," he said.
The door opened once more and then closed. James took a deep breath, and then stole away quietly to his own room.
By some instinct he knew that this was no time to intercept Mrs. Bagley with a lot of fool questions.
To the surprise and puzzlement of young James Quincy Holden, Mr. Timothy Fisher telephoned early upon the following evening. He was greeted quite cordially by Mrs. Bagley. Their conversation was rambling and inane, especially when heard from one end only, and it took them almost ten minutes to confirm their Saturday night date. That came as another shock.
Well, not quite. The explanation bothered him even more than the fact itself. As a further extension of his little mechanical mating process, James had to find a place for the like of Jake Caslow and the women Jake knew. None of them were classed in the desirable group, all of them were among the leftovers. But of course, since none of them were good enough for the 'good' people, they were good enough for one another, and that made it all right—for them.
But Mrs. Bagley was not of their ilk. It was not right that she should be forced to take a leftover.
And then it occurred to him that perhaps Mrs. Bagley was not really taking the leftover, Tim Fisher, but instead was using Tim Fisher's company as a means toward meeting a larger group, from which there might be a better specimen. So he bided his time, thinking deeply around the subject, about which he knew nothing whatsoever.
Saturday night was a repeat of Wednesday. They stayed out later, and upon their return they took possession of the living room for at least an hour before they started their routine about the going-home process. With minor variations in the dialog, and with longer and more frequent silences, it almost followed the Wednesday night script. The variation puzzled James even more. This session went according to program for a while until Tim Fisher admitted with regret that it was, indeed, time for him to depart. At which juncture Mrs. Bagley did not leap to her feet to accept his offer to do that which she had been asking him to do for a half hour. Mrs. Bagley compounded the affair by sighing deeply and agreeing with him that it was a shame that it was so late and that she, too, wished that he could stay a little longer. This, of course, put them precisely where they were a half hour earlier and they had to start the silly business all over again.
They parted after a final fifteen-minute discussion at the front door. This discussion covered Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and finally came to agreement on Wednesday.
And so James Holden went to bed that night fully convinced that in a town of approximately two thousand people—he did not count the two or three hundred A.E.C.-College group as part of the problem—there were entirely too few attractive leftovers from which Mrs. Bagley could choose.
But as this association grew, it puzzled him even more. For in his understanding, any person forced to accept a second-rate choice does so with an air of resignation, but not with a cheerful smile, a sparkle in the eyes, and two hours of primping.
James sought the answer in his books but they were the wrong volumes for reference of this subject. He considered the local Public Library only long enough to remember that it carried a few hundred books suitable for the A.E.C.-College crew and a thousand or so of second-hand culls donated by local citizens during cleanup campaigns. He resorted to buying books by mail through advertisements in newspapers and magazines and received a number of volumes of medical treatises, psychological texts, and a book on obstetrics that convinced him that baby-having was both rare and hazardous. He readBy Love Possessedbut he did not recognize the many forms of love portrayed by the author because the volume was not annotated with signs or provided with a road map, and he did not know it when he read about it.
He went through the Kinsey books and absorbed a lot of data and graphs and figures on human behavior that meant nothing to him. James was not even interested in the incidence of homosexuality among college students as compared to religious groups, or in the comparison between premarital experience and level of education. He knew the words and what the words meant as defined in other words. But they were only words and did not touch him where he lived.
So, because none of the texts bothered to explain why a woman says Yes, when she means No, nor why a woman will cling to a man's lapels and press herself against him and at the same time tell him he has to go home, James remained ignorant. He could have learned more from Lord Byron, Shelley, Keats, or Browning than from Kinsey, deLee, or the "Instructive book on Sex, forwarded under plain wrapper for $2.69 postpaid."
Luckily for James, he did not study any of his material via the medium of his father's machine or it would have made him sick. For he was not yet capable of understanding the single subject upon which more words have been expended in saying less than any other subject since the dawn of history.
His approach was academic, he could have been reading the definitive material on the life-cycle of the beetle insofar as any stir of his own blood was concerned.
From his study he did identify a couple of items. Tim Fisher obviously desired extramarital relations with Mrs. Bagley—or was it premarital relations? Probably both. Logic said that Mrs. Bagley, having already been married to Martha's father, could hardly enter intopremarital relations, although Tim could, since he was a bachelor. But they wouldn't bepremarital with Tim unless he followed through and married Mrs. Bagley. And so they must beextramarital. But whatever they were called, the Book said that there was about as much on one side as on the other.
With a mind mildly aware of the facts of life, distorted through the eyes of near-nine James Holden, he watched them and listened in.
As for Mrs. Bagley, she did not know that she was providing part of James Holden's extraliterary education. She enjoyed the company of Tim Fisher. Hesitantly, she asked James if she could have Tim for dinner one evening, and was a bit surprised at his immediate assent. They planned the evening, cleaned the lower part of the house of every trace of its current occupancy, and James and Martha hied themselves upstairs. Dinner went with candlelight and charcoal-broiled steak—and a tray taken aloft for "Mr. Maxwell" was consumed by James and Martha. The evening went smoothly. They listened to music and danced, they sat and talked. And James listened.
Tim was not the same man. He sat calm and comfortably on the low sofa with Mrs. Bagley's head on his shoulder, both of them pleasantly bemused by the dancing fireplace and with each other's company. He said, "Well, I'm glad this finally happened."
"What happened?" she replied in a murmur.
"Getting the invite for dinner."
"Might have been sooner, I suppose. Sorry."
"What took you so long?"
"Just being cautious, I guess."
He chuckled. "Cautious?"
"Uh-huh."
Tim laughed.
"What's so darned funny?"
"Women."
"Are we such a bunch of clowns?"
"Not clowns, Janet. Just funny."
"All right, genius. Explain that."
"A woman is a lovely creature who sends a man away so that he can't do what she wants him to do most of all."
"Uh-huh."