Mrs. Stone rose up, the dinner was ended. She cleared the dishes, we lit cigars; and Dudley Stone strolled me over to his office-at-home, a rolltop desk, its jaws propped wide with parcels and papers and ink bottles, a typewriter, documents, ledgers, indexes.
"It was all rolling to a boil in me. John Oatis simply spooned the froth off the top so I could see the brew. It was very clear," said Dudley Stone. "Writing was always so much mustard and gallweed to me; fidgeting words on paper, experiencing vast depressions of heart and soul. Watching the greedy critics graph me up, chart me down, slice me like sausage, eat me at midnight breakfasts. Work of the worst sort. I was ready to fling the pack. My trigger was set. Boom! There was John Oatis! Look here."
He rummaged in the desk and brought forth handbills and posters. "I had been writing about living. Now I wanted to live. Do things instead of tell about things. I ran for the board of education. I won. I ran for alderman. I won. I ran for mayor. I won! Sheriff! Town librarian! Sewage disposal official. I shook a lot of hands, saw a lot of life, did a lot of things. We've lived every way there is to live, with our eyes and noses and mouths, with our ears and hands. We've climbed hills and painted pictures, there are some on the wall! We've been three times around the world! I even delivered our baby son, unexpectedly. He's grown and married now-- lives in New York! We've done and done again." Stone paused and smiled. "Come on out in the yard; we've set up a telescope, would you like to see the rings of Saturn?"
We stood in the yard, and the wind blew from a thousand miles at sea and while we were standing there, looking at the stars through the telescope, Mrs. Stone went down into the midnight cellar after a rare Spanish wine.
It was noon the next day when we reached the lonely station after a hurricane trip across the jouncing meadows from the sea. Mr. Dudley Stone let the car have its head, while he talked to me, laughing, smiling, pointing to this or that outcrop of Neolithic stone, this or that wild flower, falling silent again only as we parked and waited for the train to come and take me away.
"I suppose," he said, looking at the sky, "you think I'm quite insane."
"No, I'd never say that."
"Well," said Dudley Stone, "John Oatis Kendall did me one other favor."
"What was that?"
Stone hitched around conversationally in the patched leather seat.
"He helped me get out when the going was good. Deep down inside I must have guessed that my literary success was something that would melt when they turned off the cooling system. My subconscious had a pretty fair picture of my future. I knew what none of my critics knew, that I was headed nowhere but down. The two books John Oatis destroyed were very bad. They would have killed me deader than Oatis possibly could. So he helped me decide, unwittingly, what I might not have had the courage to decide myself, to bow gracefully out while the cotillion was still on, while the Chinese lanterns still cast flattering pink lights on my Harvard complexion. I had seen too many writers up, down, and out, hurt, unhappy, suicidal. The combination of circumstance, coincidence, subconscious knowledge, relief, and gratitude to John Oatis Kendall to just be alive, were fortuitous, to say the least."
We sat in the warm sunlight another minute.
"And then I had the pleasure of seeing myself compared to all the greats when I announced my departure from the literary scene. Few authors in recent history have bowed out to such publicity. It was a lovely funeral. I looked, as they say, natural. And the echoes lingered. 'His next book!' the critics cried, 'would have been it! A masterpiece!' I had them panting, waiting. Little did they know. Even now, a quarter-century later, my readers who were college boys then, make sooty excursions on drafty kerosene-stinking shortline trains to solve the mystery of why I've made them wait so long for my 'masterpiece.' And thanks to John Oatis Kendall I still have a little reputation; it has receded slowly, painlessly. The next year I might have died by my own writing hand. How much better to cut your own caboose off the train, before others do it for you.
"My friendship with John Oatis Kendall? It came back. It took time, of course. But he was out here to see me in 1947; it was a nice day, all around, like old times. And now he's dead and at last I've told someone everything. What will you tell your friends in the city? They won't believe a word of this. But it is true, I swear it, as I sit here and breathe God's good air and look at the calluses on my hands and begin to resemble the faded handbills I used when I ran for county treasurer."
We stood on the station platform.
"Good-by, and thanks for coming and opening your ears and letting my world crash in on you. God bless to all your curious friends. Here comes the train! I've got to run; Lena and I are going to a Red Cross drive down the coast this afternoon! Good-by!"
I watched the dead man stomp and leap across the platform, felt the plankings shudder, saw him jump into his Model-T, heard it lurch under his bulk, saw him bang the floor-boards with a big foot, idle the motor, roar it, turn, smile, wave to me, and then roar off and away toward that suddenly brilliant town called Obscurity by a dazzling seashore called The Past.
Books by Ray Bradbury
Ahmed and the Oblivion Machines
Bradbury Speaks
Bradbury Stories
The Cat's Pajamas
Dandelion Wine
Dark Carnival
Death Is a Lonely Business
Driving Blind
Fahrenheit 451
Farewell Summer
From the Dust Returned
The Golden Apples of the Sun
A Graveyard for Lunatics
Green Shadows, White Whale
The Halloween Tree
I Sing the Body Electric!
The Illustrated Man
Journey to Far Metaphor
Kaleidoscope
Let's All Kill Constance
Long After Midnight
The Machineries of Joy
The Martian Chronicles
A Medicine for Melancholy
The October Country
One More for the Road
One Timeless Spring
Quicker Than the Eye
R Is for Rocket
S Is for Space
Something Wicked This Way Comes
The Stories of Ray Bradbury
The Toynbee Convector
When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed
Yestermorrow
Zen in the Art of Writing
Copyright
"Homecoming" and "Cistern" were copyrighted 1946 and 1947 respectively by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Mademoiselle; "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone" was copyrighted 1954 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.; "The Man Upstairs" was copyrighted 1947 by Harper & Brothers; "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" was copyrighted by Galaxy Publishing Corporation; "The Dwarf" was copyrighted 1953 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company; "Touched with Fire" was originally published under the title "Shopping for Death."
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE OCTOBER COUNTRY. Copyright (c) 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1954, 1955 by Ray Bradbury. Introduction copyright (c) 1999 by Ray Bradbury. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-9488 1
ISBN-13: 978-0-380-97387-3
ISBN-10: 0-380-97387-1
Epub Edition (c) MAY 201
3 ISBN: 9780062242259
10 QGP 10 9 8 7 6
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia https://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada https://www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
https://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
https://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
https://www.harpercollins.com
Ray Bradbury, The October Country
(Series: # )
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends