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of the distinguished restaurants made famous by Toohey’s patronage. "At least,

no one will recognize us here and bother us."

He sent a jet of smoke from his Egyptian cigarette at a faded Coca-Cola sign

over their booth, he ordered a sandwich, he nibbled daintily a slice of pickle

which was not flyspecked but looked it, and he talked to Keating. He talked at

random. What he said did not matter, at first; it was his voice, the matchless

voice of Ellsworth Toohey. Keating felt as if he were standing in the middle of

a vast plain, under the stars, held and owned, in assurance, in security.

"Kindness, Peter," said the voice softly, "kindness. That is the first

commandment, perhaps the only one. That is why I had to pan that new play, in my

column yesterday. That play lacked essential kindness. We must be kind, Peter,

to everybody around us. We must accept and forgive--there is so much to be

forgiven in each one of us. If you learn to love everything, the humblest, the

least, the meanest, then the meanest in you will be loved. Then we’ll find the

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sense of universal equality, the great peace of brotherhood, a new world, Peter,

a beautiful new world...."

9.

ELLSWORTH MONKTON TOOHEY was seven years old when he turned the hose upon Johnny

Stokes, as Johnny was passing by the Toohey lawn, dressed in his best Sunday

suit. Johnny had waited for that suit a year and a half, his mother being very

poor. Ellsworth did not sneak or hide, but committed his act openly, with

systematic deliberation: he walked to the tap, turned it on, stood in the middle

of the lawn and directed the hose at Johnny, his aim faultless--with Johnny’s

mother just a few steps behind him down the street, with his own mother and

father and the visiting minister in full view on the Toohey porch. Johnny Stokes

was a bright kid with dimples and golden curls; people always turned to look at

Johnny Stokes. Nobody had ever turned to look at Ellsworth Toohey.

The shock and amazement of the grownups present were such that nobody rushed to

stop Ellsworth for a long moment. He stood, bracing his thin little body against

the violence of the nozzle jerking in his hands, never allowing it to leave its

objective until he felt satisfied; then he let it drop, the water hissing

through the grass, and made two steps toward the porch, and stopped, waiting,

his head high, delivering himself for punishment. The punishment would have come

from Johnny if Mrs. Stokes had not seized her boy and held him. Ellsworth did

not turn to the Stokeses behind him, but said, slowly, distinctly, looking at

his mother and the minister: "Johnny is a dirty bully. He beats up all the boys

in school." This was true.

The question of punishment became an ethical problem. It was difficult to punish

Ellsworth under any circumstances, because of his fragile body and delicate

health; besides, it seemed wrong to chastise a boy who had sacrificed himself to

avenge injustice, and done it bravely, in the open, ignoring his own physical

weakness; somehow, he looked like a martyr. Ellsworth did not say so; he said

nothing further; but his mother said it. The minister was inclined to agree with

her. Ellsworth was sent to his room without supper. He did not complain. He

remained there meekly--and refused the food his mother sneaked up to him, late

at night, disobeying her husband. Mr. Toohey insisted on paying Mrs. Stokes for

Johnny’s suit. Mrs. Toohey let him do it, sullenly; she did not like Mrs.

Stokes.

Ellsworth’s father managed the Boston branch of a national chain of shoe stores.

He earned a modest, comfortable salary and owned a modest, comfortable home in

an undistinguished suburb of Boston. The secret sorrow of his life was that he

did not head a business of his own. But he was a quiet, conscientious,

unimaginative man, and an early marriage had ended all his ambition. Ellsworth’s

mother was a thin, restless woman who adopted and discarded five religions in

nine years. She had delicate features, the kind that made her look beautiful for

a few years of her life, at the one period of full flower, never before and

never afterward. Ellsworth was her idol. His sister Helen, five years older, was

a good-natured, unremarkable girl, not beautiful but pretty and healthy; she

presented no problem. Ellsworth, however, had been born puny in health. His

mother adored him from the moment the doctor pronounced him unfit to survive; it

made her grow in spiritual stature--to know the extent of her own magnanimity in

her love for so uninspiring an object; the bluer and uglier baby Ellsworth

looked, the more passionate grew her love for him. She was almost disappointed

when he survived without becoming an actual cripple. She took little interest in

Helen; there was no martyrdom in loving Helen. The girl was so obviously more

deserving of love that it seemed just to deny it to her.

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Mr. Toohey, for reasons which he could not explain, was not too fond of his son.

Ellsworth, however, was the ruler of the household, by a tacit, voluntary

submission of both parents, though his father could never understand the cause

of his own share in that submission.

In the evenings, under the lamp of the family sitting room, Mrs. Toohey would

begin, in a tense, challenging voice, angry and defeated in advance: "Horace, I

want a bicycle. A bicycle for Ellsworth. All the boys his age have them, Willie

Lovett just got a new one the other day, Horace. Horace, I want a bicycle for

Ellsworth."

"Not right now, Mary," Mr. Toohey would answer wearily. "Maybe next

summer....Just now we can’t afford..."

Mrs. Toohey would argue, her voice rising in jerks toward a shriek.

"Mother, what for?" said Ellsworth, his voice soft, rich and clear, lower than

the voices of his parents, yet cutting across them, commanding, strangely

persuasive. "There’s many things we need more than a bicycle. What do you care

about Willie Lovett? I don’t like Willie. Willie’s a dumbbell. Willie can afford

it, because his pa’s got his own dry-goods store. His pa’s a showoff. I don’t

want a bicycle."

Every word of this was true, and Ellsworth did not want a bicycle. But Mr.

Toohey looked at him strangely, wondering what had made him say that. He saw his

son’s eyes looking at him blankly from behind the small glasses; the eyes were

not ostentatiously sweet, not reproachful, not malicious; just blank. Mr. Toohey

felt that he should be grateful for his son’s understanding--and wished to hell

the boy had not mentioned that part about the private store.

Ellsworth did not get the bicycle. But he got a polite attention in the house, a

respectful solicitude--tender and guilty, from his mother, uneasy and suspicious

from his father. Mr. Toohey would do anything rather than be forced into a

conversation with Ellsworth--feeling, at the same time, foolish and angry at

himself for his fear.

"Horace, I want a new suit. A new suit for Ellsworth. I saw one in a window

today and I’ve..."

"Mother, I’ve got four suits. What do I need another one for? I don’t want to

look silly like Pat Noonan who changes them every day. That’s because his pa’s

got his own ice-cream parlor. Pat’s stuck up like a girl about his clothes. I

don’t want to be a sissy."

Ellsworth, thought Mrs. Toohey at times, happy and frightened, is going to be a

saint; he doesn’t care about material things at all; not one bit. This was true.

Ellsworth did not care about material things.

He was a thin, pale boy with a bad stomach, and his mother had to watch his

diet, as well as his tendency to frequent colds in the head. His sonorous voice

was astonishing in his puny frame. He sang in the choir, where he had no rivals.

At school he was a model pupil. He always knew his lessons, had the neatest

copybooks, the cleanest fingernails, loved Sunday school and preferred reading

to athletic games, in which he had no chance. He was not too good at

mathematics--which he disliked--but excellent at history. English, civics and

penmanship; later, at psychology and sociology.

He studied conscientiously and hard. He was not like Johnny Stokes, who never

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listened in class, seldom opened a book at home, yet knew everything almost

before the teacher had explained it. Learning came to Johnny automatically, as

did all things: his able little fists, his healthy body, his startling good

looks, his overexuberant vitality. But Johnny did the shocking and the

unexpected: Ellsworth did the expected, better than anyone had ever seen it

done. When they came to compositions, Johnny would stun the class by some

brilliant display of rebellion. Given the theme of "School Days--The Golden

Age," Johnny came through with a masterly essay on how he hated school and why.

Ellsworth delivered a prose poem on the glory of school days, which was

reprinted in a local newspaper.

Besides, Ellsworth had Johnny beaten hollow when it came to names and dates;

Ellsworth’s memory was like a spread of liquid cement: it held anything that

fell upon it. Johnny was a shooting geyser; Ellsworth was a sponge.

The children called him "Elsie Toohey." They usually let him have his way, and

avoided him when possible, but not openly; they could not figure him out. He was

helpful and dependable when they needed assistance with their lessons; he had a

sharp wit and could ruin any child by the apt nickname he coined, the kind that

hurt; he drew devastating cartoons on fences; he had all the earmarks of a

sissy, but somehow he could not be classified as one; he had too much

self-assurance and quiet, disturbingly wise contempt for everybody. He was

afraid of nothing.

He would march right up to the strongest boys, in the middle of the street, and

state, not yell, in a clear voice that carried for blocks, state without

anger--no one had ever seen Ellsworth Toohey angry--"Johnny Stokes’s got a patch

on his ass. Johnny Stokes lives in a rented flat. Willie Lovett is a dunce. Pat

Noonan is a fish eater." Johnny never gave him a beating, and neither did the

other boys, because Ellsworth wore glasses.

He could not take part in ball games, and was the only child who boasted about

it, instead of feeling frustrated or ashamed like the other boys with

substandard bodies. He considered athletics vulgar and said so; the brain, he

said, was mightier than the brawn; he meant it.

He had no close personal friends. He was considered impartial and incorruptible.

There were two incidents in his childhood of which his mother was very proud.

It happened that the wealthy, popular Willie Lovett gave a birthday party on the

same day as Drippy Munn, son of a widowed seamstress, a whining boy whose nose

was always running. Nobody accepted Drippy’s invitation, except the children who

were never invited anywhere. Of those asked for both occasions, Ellsworth Toohey

was the only one who snubbed Willie Lovett and went to Drippy Munn’s party, a

miserable affair from which he expected and received no pleasure. Willie

Lovett’s enemies howled and taunted Willie for months afterward--about being

passed up in favor of Drippy Munn.

It happened that Pat Noonan offered Ellsworth a bag of jelly beans in exchange

for a surreptitious peek at his test paper. Ellsworth took the jelly beans and

allowed Pat to copy his test. A week later, Ellsworth marched up to the teacher,

laid the jelly beans, untouched, upon her desk and confessed his crime, without

naming the other culprit. All her efforts to extract that name could not budge

him; Ellsworth remained silent; he explained only that the guilty boy was one of

the best students, and he could not sacrifice the boy’s record to the demands of

his own conscience. He was the only one punished--kept after school for two

hours. Then the teacher had to drop the matter and let the test marks remain as

they were. But it threw suspicion on the grades of Johnny Stokes, Pat Noonan,

and all the best pupils of the class, except Ellsworth Toohey.

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Ellsworth was eleven years old when his mother died. Aunt Adeline, his father’s

maiden sister, came to live with them and run the Toohey household. Aunt Adeline

was a tall, capable woman to whom the word "horse" clung in conjunction with the

words "sense" and "face." The secret sorrow of her life was that she had never

inspired romance. Helen became her immediate favorite. She considered Ellsworth

an imp out of hell. But Ellsworth never wavered in his manner of grave courtesy

toward Aunt Adeline. He leaped to pick up her handkerchief, to move her chair,

when they had company, particularly masculine company. He sent her beautiful

Valentines on the appropriate day--with paper lace, rosebuds and love poems. He

sang "Sweet Adeline" at the top of his town crier’s voice. "You’re a maggot,

Elsie," she told him once. "You feed on sores."

"Then I’ll never starve," he answered. After a while they reached a state of

armed neutrality. Ellsworth was left to grow up as he pleased.

In high school Ellsworth became a local celebrity--the star orator. For years

the school did not refer to a promising boy as a good speaker, but as "a

Toohey." He won every contest. Afterward, members of the audience spoke about

"that beautiful boy"; they did not remember the sorry little figure with the

sunken chest, inadequate legs and glasses; they remembered the voice. He won

every debate. He could prove anything. Once, after beating Willie Lovett with

the affirmative of "The Pen Is Mightier than the Sword," he challenged Willie to

reverse their positions, took the negative and won again.,

Until the age of sixteen Ellsworth felt himself drawn to the career of a

minister. He thought a great deal about religion. He talked about God and the

spirit. He read extensively on the subject. He read more books on the history of

the church than on the substance of faith. He brought his audience to tears in