Free Tornado Pratt by Paul Ableman Page A

complete with roof and windows and a little vegetable garden planted in neat rows. I glanced about to see if the owner was nearby and then, when I glanced back, I got a big shock. The cabin was derelict, roof bare to the joists, windows broken and nothing but a tangle of weeds in front. I gaped at it open mouthed, scared because I thought I must have seen something supernatural—and I still don’t know how it happened. But sitting with Harvey in Cincinnati, twenty years later, I realized that I’d never once thought of that eerie moment since and I searched in my mind to discover what had suddenly activated that long-lost molecule of time. But I couldn’t locate anything that might have triggered the memory. Meanwhile Harvey went on talking and, by the time I tuned in again, I found I’d missed a good deal of what he was saying.
    “—which would really be quite a lark.”
    Hoping to find out what I’d missed, I asked.
    “How’s that?”
    “Good Lord, Tornado, think of it!—to imprint yourself on the world forever.”
    “What would I have to do, Harvey?”
    “Well, you’ve got the energy—there’s no doubt about that—and the capacity for work, and probably the magnetism, the demagoguery , sadly indispensable, and the courage and—actually, there’s probably only one thing you lack.
    I was beginning to get his drift and it stirred me.
    “What do I lack, Harvey?”
    “Knowledge, Tornado. Oh, you’re not a raw country boy any more. You can hold your own in most circles but for that—”
    “I’d need to know a whole lot more, eh?”
    “It’s not so much quantity as kind. You’d have to steep yourself in the history and philosophy of government, starting with Plato and going on through the ancient world, the Renaissance, the rise of democracy in the modern sense and so forth. You’d have tomaster the theory and practice of government. After all, Alexander himself was tutored by Aristotle.”
    I still hadn’t firmly established what Harvey was driving at, Horace, but my heart was leaping like a bird in a net when I asked:
    “And at the end of it all, Harvey, what would I be?”
    “Why Prince of the World, Tornado, who would make a garden of the earth. I believe you’d achieve it by the age of forty or not at all. Would that be adventure enough for you? I’ll help— discreetly —from the shadows.”
    Of course, it was crazy, Horace. I knew it and I knew that Harvey knew it. It was just one of the wild gags with which we often diverted each other when we travelled together. And yet, as I gazed into Harvey’s twinkling blue eyes, strangely bright under his faded hair, and as I grinned back at him I wondered if beneath the clowning we were making a pact to rule the planet.
    Anyway, I started reading politics and the history of politics. Naturally, what I concentrated on was the history and the constitution of the USA. Pretty soon I knew a good deal about these things and in the evenings Harvey and I would have debates and disputations . Harvey was well-informed about most things but I soon out-distanced him in American studies. But Harvey was knowledgeable about the constitution and history of England, particularly since his family was a living part of it. A remote ancestor of his had been one of the heavies at Runnymede; another had been hacked down by Cromwell.
    We had teasing contests during which I would insist that England was an old lobster, sluggish because of its heavy plates of armour, while America was a salmon that could range the world and find its way home again. Then again, Harvey would claim that England was a bear, slow to anger but irresistible when roused and I would claim that America was a bee that could madden the bear by buzzing at its nose. Harvey maintained that England was an oak tree with a thousand rings to its trunk and I vaunted the superiority of an ear of corn. We had more serious arguments in which we tried, for example, to assign Napoleon’s achievements to a