The Mohammedans
H.
J.
Kaplan
IT
NEVER OCCURRED
to any of us that Simon might have been
involved in the affair of the Mohammedans. He himself not only
avoided any mention of the case, but shut himself up and saw no
one until it was over. This indeed might have been construed as
a suspicious circumstance, were it not for the fact that when we
went to see Simon it was hardly in order to discuss the pitiful
local scandals.
His full name was Charles Rodney Simon, and he had an
illustrious ancestry among the local robber barons. He was small,
middle-aged, very poor, shy, with a vehement, disjointed way of
speaking. We were not disappointed to find him bizarre, with all
inward irony and exquisite manners: it was just what we
had
been led to expect of a man who had lived abroad and seen T. S.
Eliot plain. But think! A man could tell uproarious tales about
his adventures as Lord of a Manor that was literally tumbling
down about his ears. Ambassador of the Ideal in a town whose
rapid development was due to the manufacture of fertilizer and
the trading of hogs. He never breathed a word. . . . 0, Simon,
Simon, what a
soiree
you missed!
One evening, late in the summer of 1942, he was sitting alone
at the front window of his ancestral mansion, watching the sun
go down over the park. Oddly enough, he was thinking of Negroes.
Though both streets within his range of vision shook from time
to time with the monstrous rumbling of trucks, Simon cocked
his ear to catch the faint, boisterous, confused sounds that drifted
from the other side of the park. Over there, beyond the iron fence
lined with clumps of trees and bushes, beyond the narrow strip
of lawn, the streets of the Negro neighborhood glowed already
with the garish neons, the bustling and back-slapping and ribald
shouts. Simon often walked in that neighborhood, which only the
park had prevented from engulfing his house. And he spoke often,
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