They said very little more about it. And when Randy left, his parting words at the station were:
“Well, so long, fellow! You’re going to be all right. But don’t forget to kill that wounded faun! As for me, I don’t know just what the next move is, but I’m on my way!”
With that he got aboard his train, and was gone.
But George wasn’t too sure about Randy. And the more he thought about him, the less sure he became. Randy had certainly not been licked by what had happened to him, and that was good; but there was something about his attitude—his cheerful optimism in the face of disaster—that seemed spurious. He had the clearest head of anybody George knew, but it was almost as if he had shut off one compartment of his brain and wasn’t using at. It was all very puzzling.
“There are tides in the affairs of men,” George thought musingly—“definite periods of ebb and flow…And when they come, they come, and can’t be held back by wishing.”
That was it, perhaps. It seemed to George that Randy was caught in the ebb and didn’t know it. And that was what made it so queer and puzzling—that he, of all people, shouldn’t know it.
Also, he had spoken about not wanting to get mixed up with another outfit like the old one. Did he think the fearful pressures he had been subject to were peculiar to the company he had been working for, and that their counterparts existed nowhere else? Did he suppose he could escape those conditions just by changing jobs? Did he believe it was possible by such a shift to enjoy all the glorious advantages he had ever dreamed of as a bright, ambitious youth—high income and good living far beyond what most men are accustomed to—and to do it without paying the cost in other ways?
“What will you have? quoth God; pay for it, and take it,” said Emerson, in that wonderful essay on “Compensation” that every American ought to be required by law to read…Well, that was true. One always paid for it…
Good Lord! Didn’t Randy know you can’t go home again?
The next few years were terrible ones for all America, and especially terrible for Randy Shepperton.
He didn’t get another job. He tried everything, but nothing worked. There just weren’t any jobs. Men were being let off by the thousands everywhere, and nowhere were new ones being taken on.
After eighteen months his savings were gone, and he was desperate. He had to sell the old family house, and what he got for it was a mere pittance. He and Margaret rented a small apartment, and for another year or so, by careful management, they lived on what the house had brought them. Then that, too, was gone. Randy was on his uppers now. He fell ill, and it was an illness of the spirit more than of the flesh. At last, when there was nothing else to do, he and Margaret moved away from Libya Hill and went to live with the older sister who was married, and stayed there with her husband’s family—dependents on the bounty of these kindly strangers.
And at the end of all of this, Randy—he of the clear eyes and the quick intelligence—he who was nobody’s fool—he who thought he loved the truth and had always been able to see straight to the heart of most things—Randy went on relief.
And by that time George thought he understood it. Behind Randy’s tragedy George thought he could see a personal devil in the form of a very bright and plausible young man, oozing confidence and crying: “Faith!” when there was no faith, and dressed like a travelling salesman. Yes, salesmanship had done its job too well. Salesmanship—that commercial brand of special pleading—that devoted servant of self-interest—that sworn enemy of truth. George remembered how Randy had been able to look at his alien problem and see it in the abstract, whole and clear, because there was no self-interest to cast its shadow on his vision. He could save others—himself he could not save, because he could no longer see the truth about himself.
And it seemed to George that Randy’s tragedy was the essential tragedy of America. America—the magnificent, unrivalled, unequalled, unbeatable, unshrinkable, supercolossal, 99-and-44-one-hundredths-per-cent-pure, schoolgirl-complexion, covers-the-earth, I’d-walk-a-mile-for-it, four-out-of-five-have-it, his master’s-voice, askthe-man-who-owns-one, blueplate-special home of advertising, salesmanship, and special pleading in all its many catchy and beguiling forms.