The Young Lions

He put his hand out, though. Noah shook it. The hand was tough and horny. I'm not going to beg, Noah thought, no matter what. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to pretend I'm anything much. If he says yes, fine. If he says no… Noah refused to think about that.

"Very glad," her father said, "to make your acquaintance."

They stood in an uneasy group, with the old man who served as clerk watching them with undisguised interest.

"Seems to me," Mr Plowman said, "might not be a bad idea for myself and Mr Ackerman to have a little talk."

"Yes," Hope whispered, and the tense, uncertain timbre of her voice made Noah feel that all was lost.

Mr Plowman looked around the lobby consideringly. "This might not be the best place for it," he said, staring at the clerk, who stared back curiously. "Might take a little walk around town. Mr Ackerman might like to see the town, anyway."

"Yes, Sir," Noah said.

"I'll wait here," said Hope. She sat down suddenly in the rocker. It creaked alarmingly in the still lobby. The clerk made a severe, disapproving grimace at the sound and Noah was sure that he was going to hear the complaining wooden noise in his bad moments for many years.

"We'll be back in a half-hour or so, Daughter," Mr Plowman said.

Noah winced a little at the "Daughter". It was like a bad play about life on the farm in 1900, and he had an unreal sense of melodrama and heavy contrivance as he held the door open and he and Mr Plowman went out into the snowy street. He caught a glimpse of Hope sitting behind the window, staring anxiously at them, and then they were walking slowly and deliberately past the closed shop-fronts on the cleared sidewalks, in the harsh, windy cold.

They walked without speaking for almost two minutes, their shoes making a dry crunching on the scraps of snow that the shovels had left on the pavements. Then Mr Plowman spoke.

"How much," he asked, "do they charge you in the hotel?"

"Two-fifty," Noah said.

"For one day?" Mr Plowman asked.

"Yes."

"Highway robbers," Mr Plowman said. "All hotel-keepers."

Then he fell back into silence and they walked quietly once more. They walked past Marshall's feed and grain store, past the drug-store of F. Ki

Mr Plowman's face was set and rigid, and as Noah looked from his sharp, quiet features, non-committally arranged under the old-fashioned Sunday hat, to the store-fronts, the names went into his brain like so many spikes driven into a plank by a methodical, impartial carpenter. Each name was an attack. Each name was a wall, an a

It would have been better to have the brother here, Noah thought, talking, fulminating, with all the old, familiar, ugly, spoken arguments, rather than this shrewd, silent Yankee attack.

They passed the business section, still in silence. A weathered, red-brick school building reared up across a lawn, covered with dead ivy.

"Went to school there," Mr Plowman said, with a stiff gesture of his head. "Hope."

A new enemy, Noah thought, looking at the plain old building, crouched behind its oak trees, another antagonist lying in wait for twenty-five years. There was some motto carved into the weathered stone above the portal and Noah squinted to read it. "YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH", the faded letters proclaimed to the generations of Plowmans who had walked under it to learn how to read and write and how their forefathers had set foot on the rock of Plymouth in the blustery weather of the seventeenth century, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Noah could almost hear his own father reading the words, the dead voice ringing out of the tomb with rhetorical, flaring relish.

"Cost twenty-three thousand dollars," Mr Plowman said, "back in 1904. WPA wanted to tear it down and put up a new one in 1935. We stopped that. Waste of the taxpayers' money. Perfectly good school."

They continued walking. There was a church a hundred yards down the road, its steeple rising slender and austere into the morning sky. That's where it's going to happen, Noah thought despairingly. This is the shrewdest weapon coming up. There are probably six dozen Plowmans buried in that yard, and I'm going to be told in their presence.

The church was built of white wood and lay delicately and solidly on its sloping, snowy lawns. It was balanced and reserved and did not cry out wildly to God, like the soaring cathedrals of the French and the Italians, but rather addressed Him in measured, plain terms, brief, dryly musical and to the point.

"Well," said Mr Plowman while the church was still fifty yards away, "we've probably gone far enough." He turned.

"Like to go back?"

"Yes," Noah said. He was dazed and puzzled, and walked automatically, almost unseeingly, as they started back towards the hotel. The blow had not fallen yet, and there was no indication when it would fall. He glanced at the old man's face. There was a look of concentration and puzzlement there, among the granite lines, and Noah felt that he was searching painfully in his mind for the proper cold, thoughtful words with which to dismiss his daughter's lover, words that would be fair but decisive, reasonable but final.

"You're doing an awful thing, young fellow," Mr Plowman said, and Noah felt his jaw grow rigid as he prepared to fight.

"You're putting an old man to the test of his principles. I won't deny it. I wish to God you would turn around and get on the train and go back to New York and never see Hope again. You won't do that, will you?" He peered shrewdly at Noah.

"No," said Noah. "I won't."

"Didn't think you would. Wouldn't've been up here in the first place if you would." The old man took a deep breath, stared at the cleared pavements before his feet, as he walked slowly at Noah's side. "Excuse me if I've given you a pretty glum walk through town," he said. "A man goes a good deal of his life living more or less automatically. But every once in a while, he has to make a real decision. He has to say to himself, now, what do I really believe, and is it good or is it bad? The last forty-five minutes you've had me doing that, and I'm not fond of you for it. Don't know any Jews, never had any dealings with them. I had to look at you and try to decide whether I thought Jews were wild, howling heathen, or congenital felons, or whatever.

… Hope thinks you're not too bad, but young girls've made plenty of mistakes before. All my life I thought I believed one man was born as good as another, but thank God I never had to act on it till this day. Anybody else show up in town asking to marry Hope, I'd say, 'Come out to the house. Virginia's got turkey for di

They were in front of the hotel now. Noah hadn't noticed it, listening to the old man's earnest voice, but the door of the hotel opened and Hope came quickly out. The old man stopped and wiped his mouth reflectively as his daughter stood there staring at him, her face worried and set-looking.

Noah felt as though he had been confined to a sick bed for weeks, and the list of names on the store-fronts, the Ki