“GEORGE.”
George’s suffering had been so palpable in every sentence of his letter that Randy had winced in reading it. He had felt the naked anguish of his friend’s raw wound almost as if it had been his own. But he knew that neither he nor any other man could give the help answer that George sought. He would have to find it somehow in himself. That was the only way he had ever been able to learn anything.
So when Randy drafted his reply he deliberately made his letter as casual as he could. He did not want to let it seem that he attached too much importance to the town’s reaction. He said that he did not know what he would do if he were George, since he was not a writer, but that he had always supposed a writer had to write about the life he knew. To cheer George up, he added that the people of Libya Hill reminded him of children who had not yet been told the facts of life. They still believed, apparently, in the stork. Only people who knew nothing about the world’s literature could be surprised or shocked to learn where every good book came from.
And then, in a kind of mild parenthesis, he said that Tim Wagner, the town’s most celebrated souse, noted for his wit in his rare intervals of sobriety, had been a warm supporter of the book from the beginning, but had made one reservation: “Why, hell! If George wants to write about a horse-thief, that’s all right. Only the next time I hope he don’t give his street address. And there ain’t no use in throwing in his telephone number, too.”
Randy knew this would amuse George, and it did. In fact, George told him later that it was the most sound and valuable critical advice that he had ever had.
Randy ended his letter by assuring George that even if he was a writer, he still considered him a member of the human race. And he added, in what he hoped would be a comforting postscript, that there were other angry mutterings abroad. He had heard a rumour, whispered by one of the town’s leading business men with a great air of hush-hush and please-don’t-breathe-a-word-of-this-to-anyone, that Mr. Jarvis Riggs, the president of Libya Hill’s largest bank and past hero of infallibilities, was tottering on the brink of ruin.
“So you see,” Randy concluded, “if that godly gentleman is capable of imperfection, there may still be hope of pardon even in creatures as vile as you.”
25. The Catastrophe
A day or two after receiving Randy’s reply, George was reading the New York Times one morning when his eye was caught by a small news item on an inside page. It occupied only a scant two inches or so at the bottom of a column, but the Libya Hill date line leaped out at him:
BANK FAILS IN SOUTH
LIBYA HILL, 0. C., Mar. 12—The Citizens Trust Company of this city failed to open its doors for business this morning, and throughout the day, as news of its closing spread, conditions of near-panic mounted steadily here and in all the surrounding region. The bank was one of the largest in western Old Catawba and for years had been generally regarded as a model of conservative management and financial strength. The cause of its failure is not yet known. It is feared that the losses of the people of this community may be extensive.
The alarm occasioned by the closing of the bank was heightened later in the day by the discovery of the sudden and rather mysterious death of Mayor Baxter Kennedy. His body was found with a bullet through his head, and all the available evidence seems to point to suicide. Mayor Kennedy was a man of exceptionally genial and cheerful disposition, and is said to have had no enemies.
Whether there is any connection between the two events which have so profoundly disturbed the accustomed calm of this mountain district is not known, although their close coincidence has given rise to much excited conjecture.
“So,” thought George, laying down the paper with a stunned and thoughtful air, “it has come at last!...What was it that Judge Rumford Bland had said to them?”
The whole scene in the Pullman wash-room came back to him. He saw again the stark and speechless terror in the faces of Libya Hill’s leaders and rulers as the frail but terrible old blind man suddenly confronted them and held them with his sightless eyes and openly accused them of ruining the town. As George remembered this and sat there thinking about the news he had just read, he felt quite sure there must be some direct relation between the failure of the bank and the Mayor’s suicide.
*
There was, indeed. Things had been building up to this double climax for a long time.