Worlds That Weren't

“If you wish.” Politely, doubting he would speak a word to her after this night.

“Here’s our house.” It was a small place that she shared with Behan, its frame unpainted, and like the rest of the town, thrown up overnight.

“I will bid you good night then,” he said formally.

She turned to face him, lifted her face toward his. “You can come in, if you like,” she said. “Johnny won’t be back for hours.”

He looked into her eyes and saw Troy there, on fire in the night.

“Good night, miss,” he said, and touching his hat he turned away.

She is a Jewess! Freddie wrote in his journal. Run away from her family of good German bourgeois Jews-no doubt of the most insufferable type-to become, here in Tombstone, a goddess among the barbarians.

Or so Brocius tells us. He says her name is Josephine Marcus, sometimes called Sadie.

I believe I understand this Helen now. She has sprung from the strangest people in all history, they who have endured a thousand persecutions, and so become wise-cunning. The world has tried with great energy to make the Jews base, by confining them to occupations that the world despises, and by depriving them of any hope of honor. Yet they themselves have never ceased to believe in their own high calling; and they are honored by the dignity with which they face their tormentors.

And how should we think them base? From the Jews sprang the most powerful book in history, the most effective moral law, Spinoza the most sublime philosopher, and Christ the last Christian. When Europe was sunk in barbarism, it was the Jewish philosophers who preserved for us the genius of the ancients.

Yet all people must have their self-respect, and self-respect demands that one repay both good and bad. Without the ability to occasionally revenge themselves upon their despisers, they could scarcely have held up their heads. The usury of which the Jews are accused is the least of it; it was the subtle, twisted, deceitful Jewish revolution in morals that truly destroyed the ancients-that took the natural, healthy joy of freedom, life, and power, that twisted and inverted that joy, that planted this fatal sickness among their enemies. Thus was the Jewish vengeance upon Rome.

And this is the tradition that our Helen has inherited. Her very existence here is a vengeance upon all that have tormented her people from the beginning of time. She is beautiful, she is gay…and what does she care if Troy burns? Or Rome? Or Tombstone?

When next Freddie encountered Josie, he was vomiting in the dust of Toughnut Street.

He had felt the migraine coming on earlier, but he was playing against a table of drunken stockmen who were celebrating the sale of their beeves and who were losing their money almost as fast as they could shove it across the table. Freddie was determined to fight on as long as the cards fell his way.

By the time he left the Occidental he was nearly blind with pain. The clink of the winnings in his pocket sounded in his ears like bronze bells. The Arizona sun flamed on his skull. He staggered two blocks-people turned their eyes from him, as if he were drunk-and then collapsed as the cramp seized his stomach. People hurried away from him as he emptied the contents of his stomach into the dust. The spasms racked him long after he had nothing left to vomit.

Freddie heard footsteps, then felt the firm touch of a hand on his arm. “Freddie? Shall I get a doctor?”

Humiliation burned in his face. He had no wish that his helplessness should even be acknowledged-he could face those people who hurried away; there could be a pretense that they had seen nothing, but he couldn’t bear that another person should see him in his weakness.

“It is normal,” he gasped. “Migraine. I have medicine in my room.”

“Can you get up? I’ll help you.”

He wiped his face with his handkerchief, and then her hand steadied him as he groped his way to his feet. His spectacles were hanging from one ear, and he adjusted them. It didn’t help-his vision had narrowed to the point where it seemed he was looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope. He shuffled down Toughnut toward his room-he rented the back room of a house belonging to a mining engineer and his family, and paid the wife extra for meals that would not torment his digestion. He groped for the door, pushed it open, and stumbled toward the bed. He swiped off the pyramid of books that lay on the blanket and threw himself onto the mattress. A whirlwind spun through his head.

“Thank you,” he muttered. “Please go now.”

“Where is your medicine?”

He gestured vaguely to the wooden box by his washbasin. “There. Just bring me the box.”

He heard her boot heels booming like pistol shots on the wooden floor, and fought down another attack of nausea. He heard her open the velvet-padded box and scrutinize the contents. “Chloral hydrate!” she said. “Veronal! Do you take this all the time?”

“Only when I am ill,” he said. “Please-bring it.”