790
PARTISAN REVIEW
just a single person." It seemed to him a piece of supererogation;
perhaps it was not even altogether genuine. But genuine or not, he
then said to himself, it was at least what he thought and it gave
his
measure on at least one side. That there were actions, by civilized
rules inhuman, which turned out after all, because they were done,
to be human. The rules were false, they were weak, they assumed
false things. Which was a scandal, people swearing by them unpre–
pared for the savagery that again and again overthrew them. Of
course, thought Scampi. He himself, not having seen by any means the
worst, had seen enough in his Japanese internment, children too weak
to be taken out of their cribs and mothers who became whores to the
guards to get a little rice for them. But why should such known facts
have any practical bearing on Weyl's relations with his sister?
"But when she saw that you were sick, what did she do?" he
asked.
"Made me stop. I still wouldn't admit it, and that was a sorry
thing, too. She couldn't make me admit it, however. 'For Christ's
sake, I can see it, so why can't you say it,' she said. But the only
thing I felt like saying was, 'Collect me, God.' That would have made
sense. But what she proposed, you see, was that I stay in Galena.
Till I felt better. I wouldn't go to a hotel or to the hospital, and of
course I wouldn't go back to the Neffs. There I would have died for
sure, like one of those Polynesians whose
mana
gets a fatal touch
and who can't live after. She didn't suggest that I go back to the
house, though it would have explained my bad behavior
if
it turned
out that all the time I had been sick. Even what I had done at the
window-sill would have passed then. But no, I couldn't stay. I didn't
want Fanny to take me to Chicago either, as she offered to do. Not
because I needed someone to take me. No, I told her to go back.
Then she began to weep. Things couldn't have been worse for her;
everything fizzled; her scheme didn't seem worth all the trouble; she
doesn't really care about Neff; and besides she had to go back red–
eyed from walking her brother to the train. I climbed on, shivering,
wrapped in my coat. She stayed on the platform, trying to decide,
perhaps, whether to return to the house or to leave with me. But
I had nothing to offer, either, not a solitary thing. I muffled myself
like a man with a toothache, or an embezzler who doesn't want to
be photographed, snapped in the train window as he starts off for
