“You don’t believe that?”
“Hell, no!”—scornfully. “I’ll bet you anything you like that if you could really find out what’s going on in old Edison’s mind, you’d find that he wished he could stay in bed every day until two o’clock in the afternoon! And then get up and scratch himself! And then lie around in the sun for a while! And hang round with the boys down at the village store, talking about politics, arid who’s going to win the World Series next autumn!”
“Then what keeps him from it, if that’s what he wants to do?”
“Why,” he cried impatiently, “laziness! That’s all. He’s afraid to do it because he knows he’s so damned lazy! And he’s ashamed of being lazy, and afraid he’ll get found out! That’s why!”
“Ah, but that’s another thing! Why is he ashamed of it?”
“Because,” he said earnestly, “every time he wants to lie in bed until two o’clock in the afternoon, he hears the voice of his old man----”
“His old man?”
“Sure. His father.” He nodded vigorously.
“But Edison’s father has been dead for years, hasn’t he?”
“Sure—but that doesn’t matter. He hears him just the same. Every time he rolls over to get an extra hour or two, I’ll bet you he hears old Pa Edison hollering at him from the foot of the stairs, telling him to get up, and that he’s not worth powder enough to blow him sky high, and that when he was his age, he’d been up four hours already and done a whole day’s work—poor, miserable orphan that he was!”
“Really, I didn’t know that. Was Edison’s father an orphan?”
“Sure—they all are when they holler at you from the foot of the stairs. And school was always at least six miles away, and they were always barefooted, and it was always snowing. God!” he laughed suddenly. “No one’s old man ever went to school except under polar conditions. They all did. And that’s why you get up, that’s why you drive yourself, because you’re afraid not to—afraid of ‘that damned Joyner blood in you.’...So I’m afraid that’s the way it’s going to be with me until the end of my days. Every time I see the Ile de France or the Aquitania or the Berengaria backing into the river and swinging into line on Saturday, and see the funnels with their racing slant, and the white breasts of the great liners, and something catches at my throat, and suddenly I hear mermaids singing—I’ll also hear the voice of the old man yelling at me from as far as back as I can remember, and telling me I’m not worth the powder to blow me up. And every time I dream of tropic isles, of plucking breadfruit from the trees, or of lying stretched out beneath a palm-tree in Samoa, fanned by an attractive lady of those regions clad in her latest string of beads—I’ll hear the voice of the old man. Every time I dream of lying sprawled out with Peter Breughel in Cockaigne, with roast pigs trotting by upon the hoof, and with the funnel of a beer bung in my mouth—I’ll hear the voice of the old man. Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all. I’m lazy—but every time I surrender to my baser self, the old man hollers from the stairs.”
George was full of his own problems and talked about them constantly. Randy was an understanding listener. But suddenly one day, towards the end of Randy’s visit, the thought struck George as strange that his friend should be taking so much time off from his job. He asked Randy about it. How had he managed it?
“I haven’t got a job,” Randy answered quietly with his little embarrassed laugh. “They threw me out.”
“You mean to say that that bastard Merrit—” George began, hot with instant anger.
“Oh, don’t blame him,” Randy broke in. “He couldn’t help it. The higher-ups were on his tail and he had to do it. He said I wasn’t getting the business, and it’s true—I wasn’t. But what the Company doesn’t know is that nobody can get the business any more. It isn’t there, and hasn’t been for the last year or so. You saw how it was when you were home. Every penny anybody could get hold of went into real estate speculation. That was the only business they had left down there. And now, of course, that’s gone, too, since the bank failed.”