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PARTISAN REVIEW
hotel, having been taken there out of pure intuition. Much quicker
on his feet than Johnson, the gambler had also taken himself off to
Palm Springs a few days before the reformers made their first call
on the Mayor. Hardly an hour after the distasteful interview, the
postman brought the Mayor's afternoon mail which contained a
postcard from his vacationing friend. "Dear Old Pal: I'm a little
short right now, but if I had the dough I'd bring you and the wife
down for a visit. Bet you could use a change."
The Mayor looked skeptically at the sun-drenched postcard and
at last had a modest inspiration. Bowman had enough money and
ought
to retire, he decided. It seemed unreasonable for the gambler,
a childless man, to persist in money-making beyond a certain point,
a point reached the moment the furious, seedy committee entered
the Mayor's office. The difficulty was that Bowman would certainly
not think of retiring. The Mayor scolded himself for not having de–
voted more energy in recent years to the patient moral instruction that
might have almost imperceptibly taught Charlie the lesson of
moderation. The rest of the afternoon Johnson went over the problem
of
th~
illegality of gambling in a country that obviously wanted to
gamble and found it a knotty one. All of this was before the public
airing of Susie's gift and so these lazy speculations were not un–
natural.
True, he admitted, sketching a little pattern with his thumbnail
on his leather chair, he hadn't meant to close the Tropical Club
when he took office, but neither had any other Mayor, a number of
them men of impeccable character, if all somewhat backward in
their social views. Mayor Johnson was different from his predecessors
in that he realized, in this small town, the degrading obsolescence
of his post and often felt ridiculous in his official capacity. Johnson's
intelligence was superior to his luck and this gave a leisurely, ob–
jective tone to his mind. He might reasonably have earned $10,000
a year and had never earned beyond $4,000, which was reasonable
also. Happily his moderate fate was matched by his moderate
temperament, so much so that he could not even imagine extreme
deprivation or interesting success for himself, and yet, reading
newspapers or novels, he could sometimes experience those unpredict–
able circumstances that shrank or exalted other men.
In many ways more sensitive than his friends, the Mayor was
