"Oh, it does?" said Mr. Gibson spitefully. He felt Rosemary's body tensing.
"Shall I guess?" said she, in a brave voice that was full of fear. "He married me ten weeks ago ... to s-save me. He likes to help waifs and strays, you see. It's his hobby. But when I got well . . . there he was, still stuck with me."
"What!" cried Mr. Gibson, outraged. He grabbed her with both arms as if she might fall with his agitation. "No. No!"
"Well, then?" she trembled. "I don't know why you wanted to do it, Kenneth. I only guess . . . it's something Ethel put in your head." She leaned forward, far away from him, and put her hands on the front seat and laid her face on her forearm. "I'm afraid—it's something about me." And Mr. Gibson's heart ached terribly.
"We don't know," said Lee mournfully, over his shoulder. "Nope, we still don't know what it was that shook him."
Virginia said, "I should think you might tell us. We've been so close. Please tell us." Her little face was a moon setting on the horizon of the back of the seat. Her hand came up and touched Rosemary's hair compassionately. "It would be good for you to tell us,"
Mrs. Boatright said with massive confidence. "He will, in a minute."
Paul said, "You can take a short cut up Appleby Place."
"I'm way ahead of you," said Lee, "and Lavinia's had them on the phone by now."
"Lavinia!" spat Paul. "That girl with no clothes!" He evidently couldn't imagine being both naked and reliable.
Marsh said airily in his high incisive voice, "I guess Gibson likes his secret reason; hugs it to his bosom. Won't show it to us. Oh, no, we might spoil his fun."
"Don't talk like that!" cried Rosemary, straightening up. "You sound like Ethel."
So everybody talked at once, telling the painter who Ethel was.
"An amateur," the painter groaned. He had one foot up against the seat ahead. His socks were yellow. "How I loathe and despise these amateurs! These leaping amateurs! Amateur critics." He uttered a long keen. "Amateur psychologists are among the worst. Skim a lot of stuff out of an abbreviated article in a twenty-five-cent magazine . . . and then they know. So they treat their friends and neighbors out of their profundity. They put their big fat clumsy hands in where the daintiest probe can't safely go, and they rip and they tear. Nothing so cruel as an amateur, doing good. I'd like to strangle the lot of them."
Mr. Gibson stirred. "No," he said. "No, now I want you
to be fair to Ethel. I'll have to try to make you understand. It's just that . . . perhaps Ethel made me see it . . . but it's the doom." There. He had told them.
"Doom?" said Mrs. Boatright encouragingly.
He would have to explain. "We aren't free," he said earnestly. "We are simply doomed. It . . . well, it just suddenly hit me very hard. To realize ... I mean to believe and begin to apply—the fact that choice is only an illusion. That we are at the mercy of things in ourselves that we cannot even know. That we are not able to help ourselves or each other . . ."
They were all silent, so he pressed on.
"We are dupes, puppets. What each of us will do can be predicted. Just as the bomb ... for instance ... is bound to fall, human nature being what it . . ."
"Baloney," groaned the painter. "The old sad baloney! Predict me —Gibson. I dare you! You mean to say you got yourself believing that old-fashioned drivel?" he sputtered out.
But Rosemary said, "Yes, I see. Yes, I know. Me, too."
Then everybody else in the car, except Paul, seemed to be talking at once.
The bus driver's voice emerged on top. "Lookit!" he shouted. "You cannot, from where you sit, predict! I told you. Accidents! There's the whole big fat mixed-up universe . . ."
"What if I can't predict?" said Mr. Gibson, somewhat spiritedly defending his position. "An expert . . ."
"No, no. We are all ignorant," cried the nurse. "But it's the experts who know that. They know we're guessing. They know we're guessing better and better, because they're trying to check up on the guesses. You have to believe that, Mr. Gibson."
Mr. Gibson was suddenly touched. His heart quivered as if something had reached in and touched it.
Mrs. Boatright cleared her throat. "Organized human effort," she began.
"This is not the PTA, Mary Anne," the artist said severely. "This is one simple intelligent male. Give me a crack at him." He had come so far forward to peer at Mr. Gibson that he seemed to be crouching, angular as a cricket, on air. "Listen, Gibson. Take a cave man."
"Yes," said Mr. Gibson, helplessly, with a kind of melting feeling. "I'm taking one."
"Did he foresee his descendants flying over the North Pole to get from here to Europe tomorrow?"
"Of course not."
"So . . . how can you be as narrow-minded as a cave man?"
"Narrow?"
"Certainly. You extrapolate a future on what's known now. You extend the old lines. What you don't take into account are the surprises."
"Hey!" said the bus driver. "Hey! Hey!"
"Every big jump is a surprise, a revelation," lectured the artist, "and a tangent off the old. Penicillin. Atom splitting. Who guessed they were coming?"
"Exactly," cried Virginia. "Or the wheel? Or television? How do we know what's coming next?" She was all excited. "Maybe some whole vast opening up in a direction we've hardly thought of . . ."
"Good girl," said Theo Marsh, "Have you ever done any modeling?"
"Of the spirit, too," boomed Mrs. Boatright. "Of the mind. Men have developed ideals undreamed in antiquity. You simply cannot deny it. Would your cave man understand the Red Cross?"
"Or the S.P.C.A.," said the bus driver, "him and his saber-toothed playmates. Doom—schmoom. Also, if you gotta, you very often do. Take a jump, I mean. I'm talking about the bomb . . ."
"So the bomb might not fall," said Rosemary. She lifted her clasped hands in a kind of ecstasy, "because men might find something even better than common sense by tomorrow morning. Who knows? Not Ethel! Ethel is too—"
"Too rigid, I expect," said the painter. "Death is too rigid. Rigor is mortis. Keep your eyes open. You'll be surprised!" This was his credo. Mr. Gibson found himself stretching the physical muscles around his eyes.
"It's gonna fall if you sit on your fanny and expect it," the bus driver said, "that's for sure. But everybody isn't just sitting around, telling themselves they are so smart they can see their fate coming. Lookit, we'll know the latest news today, when we look backward from fifty years. Not before. The present views with alarm. It worries. It should. But these trends sneak up like a mist that you don't notice."
"Righto!" shouted the artist. ''You don't even see what's already around you in your own home town."
"People can, too, help each other," said Rosemary. She was sitting on his lap yet turned in facing him. "And I'm the living proof. You helped me because you wanted to, Kenneth. There wasn't any other reason."
"The ayes have it," the painter said. (Perhaps he said "eyes.") "You are overruled, Gibson. You haven't got a leg to die on. You can't logically kill yourself on that silly old premise." He drew back upon the seat and crossed his legs complacently.
The bus driver said dubiously, "However, logic . . ."
The nurse suddenly put her forehead against his arm.
Mrs. Boatright said firmly, "If you see that you were wrong, now you must admit it That is the only way to progress."
And then they waited.
Mr. Gibson's churning mind settled, sad and slow as a feather. "But in my error," he said quietly, "I may have caused a death."
Paul said uncontrollably, "If anything happened to Mama or Jeanie, I'll never forgive you."
"Don't say 'never,' " said Virginia, raising her head and speaking gently.
"It ain't scientific to say 'never,' hey?" said the bus driver, and leaned and kissed her ear.
The car shot off the boulevard upon a short cut.
Everyone was silent. The excitement was over. The poison was still lost. They hadn't found it.