368
STEVEN MARCUS
count of it could be made. " 'He went like that,' Spade said, 'like a fist
when you open your hand.' ..
Five years later, Mrs. Flitcraft came to the agency at which Spade
was working and told them that" 'she had seen a man in Spokane who
looked a lot like her husband.' .. Spade went off to investigate and
found that it was indeed Flitcraft. He had been living in Spokane for a
couple of years under the name of Charles Pierce. He had a successful
automobile business, a wife, a baby son, a suburban home, and usually
played golf after four in the afternoon, just as he had in Tacoma.
Spade and he sat down to talk the matter over. Flitcraft, Spade re–
counts, :'had no feeling of guilt. He had left his family well provided
for, and what he had done seemed to him perfectly reasonable. The
only thing that bothered him was a doubt that he could make that
reasonableness clear" to his interlocutor. When Flitcraft went out to
lunch that day five years before in Tacoma, " 'he passed an office-build–
ing that was being put up.... A beam or something fell eight or ten
stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him.' " A chip of
smashed sidewalk flew up and took a piece of skin off his cheek. He
was otherwise unharmed. He stood there " 'scared stiff,' " he told
Spade, " 'but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like
somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.' "
Until that very moment Flitcraft had been" 'a good citizen and a
good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply'
because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his sur–
roundings.... The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible
affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally
none of these things.... What disturbed him was the discovery that in
sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step,
with life.' " By the time he had finished lunch, he had reached the
decision" 'that he would change his life at random by simply going
away.' " He went off that.afternoon, wandered around for a couple of
years, then drifted back to the Northwest, " 'settled in Spokane and got
married. His second wife didn't look like the first, but they were more
alike than they were different.' .. And the same held true of his second
life. Spade then moves on to his conclusion: " 'He wasn't sorry for
what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don't think
he even knew he had settled back into the same groove that he had
jumped out of in Tacoma. But that's the part of it I always liked. He
adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and
