Pity Him Afterwards

The madman moved until he could see the rest of the room. The old man was alone.

The madman crouched on the porch. What to do? He needed a place of refuge, a safe hiding place just until morning. But it would have to be indoors, where the searchers wouldn’t look. It would have to be inside this house.

The madman moaned low and soft, and shook his head back and forth. He felt very mournful, because human beings were so perverse, and they forced him to such excesses.

If human beings were good, how sweet life would be! But Doctor Chax summed them up: warm brown voice and cold blue eye. They would act friendly and sympathetic, but it was all false; just turn your back and they would betray you.

The madman hunkered on his heels, resting his back against the clapboard front of the house, between the door and the window. What he wished he could do was just knock on the door and say to the old man, “Pardon me, sir, I would very much like to abide here until morning, if I may?” If only the old man would say, “Of course! Aren’t we all brothers?”

But he wouldn’t.

And if he did, it would only be because he’d recognized him, as the driver did, and was planning to telephone to Doctor Chax as soon as he could sneak away.

That was the way people were.

The driver, too. He had seemed so good. But he had proved himself false.

The madman had been walking beside the highway. He hadn’t been actively trying to hitch a ride, because he knew that was the way to draw attention to yourself and wind up with someone phoning the police: “Suspicious-looking character thumbing a ride out on the highway.” So he’d just been walking along, in the suit and hat and sneakers — his own sneakers, the only shoes they’d let him wear at the asylum — when the car had stopped. A noisy eight-year-old Plymouth. And the driver had said, “Want a ride to the next town?”

He had gotten in. Though for a second he had hesitated, afraid the driver would ask him questions: “Where you headed?” “Where you from?” But he knew himself to be clever; he’d be able to think up lies.

The asylum had done that much for him. They’d put him away there not because he was crazy — he knew what crazy was, and it wasn’t him — but because he’d never learned to lie. All the people who thought they weren’t crazy, they told lies all the time. It was the way the world was run. Big lies, little lies. He saw truth, and told truth, and so they said he was crazy and they put him away in the asylum. And in the asylum he learned the value of cleverness — how to fool them, how to lie to them — and he learned the uses of falseness. But still they wouldn’t let him go. His rages were righteous and came only when he was strongly provoked, but they refused to accept that. And where he had learned to make do without truth when necessary, he would never learn — never even try to learn — to make do without logic and righteousness.

So, armed with the cleverness they’d taught him in the asylum, he had gotten in the car, in the Plymouth, sitting beside the driver. The driver pushed the Plymouth very fast down the highway, and pleasant soothing music came from the car radio. And the driver didn’t ask questions; instead, he talked about himself.

He was an actor, he said. He was on his way to a job in a summer theater. It was a repertory company, which would present eleven plays this summer. No packages, the actor assured him, and went on to explain that packages were touring shows, usually with a famous actor in the leading role, which went a week at one summer theater and then a week at the next, and so on. But the summer theater where the driver was going was not like that; it was true summer stock, with a company that put on all the plays itself, doing this week’s play tonight, rehearsing next week’s play this afternoon.

The driver was one of those people who loves his job so much he can never stop talking about it. He and the madman rode together nearly three hours, and the driver never stopped talking about theater. He told the madman all about the way a summer theater is run, and the kind of part for which he’d been hired, and what he had done in his career up till this point, and the names of all the people in theater he knew, and anecdotes about them, and on and on. After a while, he was repeating himself. But the madman didn’t mind. It was pleasant to listen to, and he was actually interested; at one time he himself had thought idly of a theatrical career. But that was in another life.

Behind and beneath the driver’s rambling talk the radio played music and commercials and news broadcasts and weather reports, all soothing, soporific, a pleasant soft accompaniment to the driver’s chatter. Until the eleven-o’clock news broadcast, which told all about the madman, and gave his description.

The driver had known immediately. The madman could tell. But, to try to fool him, he’d said, “Why, that description could fit anybody. It could fit me. It could even fit you.”