Sunday. I said we had already accepted another invitation.
The Farsons have returned from Detroit, their training over. Susie dropped in to see Iva at the library. The baby had grippe; not a serious case. They have decided to send her to Farson's parents in Dakota, while they themselves go to California to work in an aircraft factory.
Susie is in good spirits and is delighted at going to California. Walter missed the child more than she did. They intend to send for her as soon as they settle down.
March 5
TnER'P. is a woman who goes through the neighborhood with a shopping bag full of Christian Science literature. She stops young men and talks to them. Since we cover the same streets, I encounter her often, but she keeps forgetting me, and it is not always possible to avoid her. For her part, she has no understanding of the art of stopping people. She rushes to block you with her body clumsily, almost despairingly. If she misses, she is incapable of following up, and if you succeed in eluding her-if you want to elude her, if you have the heart to continue doing so time after time she can only stand, defeated, staring after you. If you do stop, she takes out her tracts and begins to speak.
She must be nearly fifty, a tall and rather heavy woman. But she has a sickly face thin chapped lips, square yellow teeth, recessed brown eyes which yott vainly read and reread for a meaning.
The skin under her eyes reveals tiny, purple, intersecting vessels. Her hair is grizzled, her forehead is broad and blazed with a scar that resembles an old bullet wound. She speaks in a rapid whisper. I listen and wait for an opportunity to disengage myself.
Her speech is memorized. I watch her chapped lips through which the words come, so dry and rapid, often pronounced as though she did not understand them. The words, the words trip her fervor. She says she has talked to many young men who are about to go to war, who are going to face destruction. Her duty is to tell them that the means of saving themselves is at hand if they want it. Nothing but belief can save them. She has spoken to many others who have come back from the jungles and the fox holes, surviving the maiming fire only because of their faith. The doctrines of the science are not superstitions but true science, as has been proved.
She has a pamphlet of testimonials, written by soldiers who know how to believe.
Meanwhile her face and theddard brown shells of her eyes do not change. She writes on a pad while she is talking. when she is done, she hands you the paper. It containsthe names and addresses of the various churches and Reading Rooms in the neighborhood. And that is all. She is now at your mercy. She waits.
Her lips come together like the seams of a badly sewn baseball. Her face burns and wastes under your eyes; the very hairs at the corners of her mouth seem already to have shriveled. When, after a long pause, you do not offer to buy one of the tracts, she walks away, her run-down shoes knocking on the pavementHer load swinging as heavily as a bag of sand.
Yesterday she was sicker than ever. Her skin was the color of brick dust; her breath was sour. In her old tam that half-covered the scar, and her rough, blackened coat buttonedto the neck, she suggested the figure of a minor politicalleader in exile, unwelcome, shabby, burning with a double fever.
She addressed me in the usual whisper.
"You spoke to me two weeks ago," I said.
"Oh. Well… I have a pamphlet here about the beliefsof Science. And testimony by…"
She groped. Then I felt sure it had taken her these extra minutes to hear what I had said. I was about to ask, "Don't you feel well?" but, from fear of offending her, I held back. Her lips were more badly chapped than I had ever seen them. On the protruding point of the upper, a scab had formed.
"The men from Bataan," I said. "The one you told me about last time."
"Yes. Five cents."
"Which would you rather sell me, this or the other?" She held out the one with the veterans' testimony. "You're going to the Army, too? This is the one." She took the coin and slid it into her pocket, which was edged with a sort of charred fur. Then she said, "You're going to read it."
I don't know what prevented me from saying yes.
"I'll try to find time for it," I said.
"No, then you aren't going to. I'll take it back."
"I want to keep it."
"You can have your nickel. Here it is back."
I refused it. She shook her lowered head as a child might, sorrowing.
"I'm going to read this," I said. I thrust the pamphlet into my coat.
"You mustn't be proud," she said. She misunderstood my smile. At that moment she looked very grimly sick; though her eyes retained their hard brown centers, the whites had lost their moisture and, in each, a dry streak of vein had appeared.
"I give you my word, I'll read it."
She had held out her hand with a stiff movement of her arm to receive the pamphlet back. Now her hand went back to her side. For a while, as I watched her face with its small chin and large, marred forehead, I thought she had lost all sense of her whereabouts. But she soon picked up her bag and walked away.
March 10
RAIN, yesterday, that turned hire snow overnight" Cold again.
March 12
RECEIVED a note from Kitty, asking why I hadn't stopped by lately. I tore it up before Iva could see it. I haven't thought about Kitty lately. I can't be missing her much.
SUND," was warm, hinting at spring. We visited the Almstadts. In the evening I walked in Humboldt Park, around the lagoon, across the bridge to the boathouse where we used to discuss Man and Superman and where, even earlier, with John Pearl, I pelted the lovers on the benches below the balcony with crab apples. The air had a brackish smell of wet twigs and moldering brown seed pods, but it was soft, and through it rose, with indistinct but thrilling reality, meadows and masses of trees, blue and rufous stone and reflecting puddles. After dark, as I was return. ing, a warm, thick rain began falling with no more warn. ing than a gasp. I ran.
March 16 g. nother Talk with the Spirit of Alternatives.
"I can't tell you how much I appreciate your coming back."
"Yes?"
"And I'd like to apologize.88That's not necessary.88And explain."
"I'm used to abuse. It's in the line of duty."
"But I want to say-I'm a chopped and shredded man."
"Easily exasperated."
"You know how it is. I'm harried, pushed, badgered, worried, nagged, heckled @?
"By what? Conscience?"
"Well, it's a kind of conscience. I don't respect it as I do my own. It's the public part of me. It goes dee. It's the world, internalized, in short.", What does it want?
"It wants me to stop living this way. It's prodding me to the point where I thall no longer care what happens to "When you will give up?"
"Yes, that's it."
"Well, why don't you do that? Here you are preparing yourself for further life '@.
"And you think I should quit."
"The vastest experience of your time doesn't have much to do with living. Have you thought of preparing yourself for that?"
"Dying? You're angry because I threw the orange peel."
"I mean it."
"What's there to prepare for? You can't prepare for anything but living. You don't have to know anything to be dead. You have merely to learn that you will one day be dead.
I learned that long ago.. No, we're both joking. I know you didn't mean that."
"Whatever I mean, you get it twisted up."
"No. But I'm half-serious. You want me to worship the anti-life. I'm saying that there are no values outside life.
There is nothing outside life."
"We're not going to argue about that. But you have impossible aims. Everybody else is dangling, too.