The Middle of the Journey

by Lionel Trilling

  It was very still. Hens pecked about the lawn and three fat hounds came up in the most amiable way to nose the visitors. On the low veranda sat an old man in a rocker. He was asleep with his toothless mouth open, but he woke when they came onto the porch and he closed his mouth and nodded to them. Nancy said, “Hello, Mr. Folger. Nice day,” and nodded vigorously.

  “Mr. Folger’s father,” she said to Laskell. “Ninety-two years old.”

  She did not have to whisper, the old man was deaf. He was a very clean old man in a blue shirt buttoned up to his neck and a felt hat. He said something, perhaps friendly, but it was a mumble under his mustache and could not be understood. Laskell was dismayed. He felt uncomfortable before this old man with his watery eyes and vanishing faculties. He wondered how Nancy had arranged for the meals to be served—the idea of having to eat with the family at table with this old man filled him with a chilled, helpless revulsion.

  A woman came to the screen door, smiling and holding the door open for them to enter. They came into a cool, dark dining-room.

  “This is our friend John Laskell,” Nancy said, and Mrs. Folger held out her hand.

  She was a pale, drawn woman, notably wide at the hips, narrow in the shoulders, and cheerful about the eyes. Laskell liked her immediately. She had a quick social suspicion of him, a desire to make an impression on him and to keep him from making an impression on her. She appeared to consider herself at a disadvantage with these three people, city people, with their way of talking, strangers to her, friends among themselves. But she controlled these emotions and made herself a pleasant hostess under difficulties. She made a good deal of verbal fuss about her being in an apron to receive them, and about the flour that had got into the cracks of her hands and under her nails. But at the same time she was aware that these were things that gave her standing with her visitors.

  She turned to Laskell and wrinkled her brows into a frown and said, “So you’ve gone and got yourself sick, a big boy like you! You ought to know better than that.” She looked at him. “Pale as a ghost,” she said. “Well, we’ll just have to make you well again, that’s all.” She appealed to Nancy, “Won’t we, Mrs. Croom?”

  The pleasure rose girlishly in Nancy’s face. “I suppose we’ll have to, Mrs. Folger, or he’ll just be a nuisance.”

  “That’s right, just be a nuisance,” said Mrs. Folger.

  It was the conspiracy of all women to keep men from being a nuisance, the loving, ironic, unsatisfactory conspiracy. Nancy loved being in it. Her cheeks were flushed and her gray eyes were merry. “And we’ll not have you being a nuisance,” she said, and shook her head and her finger at Laskell.

  “But this boy must be tired, we’ll just show him to his room.” If for a moment Nancy had seized the leadership of the female conspiracy by her contribution of the idea of the nuisance, Mrs. Folger was now again entirely in command and Nancy was quite content to have her there. Mrs. Folger led the way upstairs. Laskell followed with Nancy, and Arthur went out for the bags.

  They passed through a little dark front hall, cool and even chilly, smelling not unpleasantly of damp, and climbed the steep and narrow stairs. The room was large and light. On one side it faced into a full spreading tree and on the other side toward the fields and hills. The furniture was the old commonplace yellow furniture of forty or fifty years before, giving off a smell of wood and varnish. There was a washstand with a pitcher and bowl and slop jar, and there was a dresser and a table, both covered with clean white linen tidies edged with tatting. The big bed was of brass.

  Nancy said, “Isn’t it nice?”

  It was nice and Laskell said so.

  Arthur came in with the bags. “Well, here you are!” said Arthur.

  They both smiled to Laskell in that bright, clean, worn room with its tree and its view. In their pride at what they had provided for him and in their welcome, in Mrs. Folger’s honest, wry satisfaction at his approval of the room, Laskell felt happy too.

  And yet beneath the happiness there was still moving a something lost, a part of himself, a dull part or a bad part, some little dark worm of a thing, sullen and lost and not yet comforted, sending into all this brightness dumb messages of unease.

  “And now,” said Nancy, “you get yourself settled and take a rest and we’ll pick you up for dinner in an hour. I did tell you, didn’t I, that you’re having dinner with us this evening?”

  As soon as they left him, Laskell went to look out of the window at the strong, unspectacular dips and rolls of the glacier-cut landscape. Each field was a different color, brown or yellow or varying greens, rolling steeply. It was very quiet, except for the repeated crow of a rooster. He saw Nancy and Arthur get into their car and drive away, and though they were to return for him in an hour, he wished they hadn’t had to go.

  The countryside was so still, so without people, though bearing everywhere the signs of human work, there was so much silence around the house, that Laskell began to feel large and obtrusive and embarrassed by himself. He had the feeling that not everything had been settled, that there was some other thing, some one other thing, not accounted for.

  He opened his two bags and began to arrange his belongings. On the dresser he made a little row of the few books he had brought. This he flanked by a precise stack of notes for the book he was writing about the planned cities of antiquity. He took out the waders, which almost filled one of the bags, and hung them up. He put his tackle-box on a shelf in the closet, and wished he had not left the rod and creel at the Crooms’. He was glad to have his fishing things with him. He remembered the absurd squabble with Paine about taking them. She had said “Yes,” and he had said “No.” Now he was glad that she had won. He put his shirts and underwear into a drawer of the dresser. He placed two cartons of cigarettes very exactly beside his books.

  All this helped a little. But he could not go on arranging things, for now he had no more things to arrange. So the apprehension grew, the sense of his size, of his exposure, of how dangerous this empty new world was. And there came to him, at first dim and unrecognized, then increasingly heard and more and more charged with nostalgia, like a strain of known music coming nearer, the sense of his vanished life of illness, of the beauty and truth of that life.

  He stood there suddenly desolated by the loss.

  He called nothing to his aid to check the deprivation that flooded over him, not reason, not pride, not shame. Nothing that he had now and nothing that he was likely ever to have could have anything like the value of the peace, the strength and integrity he had known in his ill-health. He thought with a cold and justified anger of all that happened to him in the short time since his illness—he thought of Paine’s impatience to desert him, of Gifford Maxim’s visit, of Maxim’s madness and treachery, hating Maxim, but hating almost as much the cause that Maxim maligned and betrayed, for that cause, as much as Maxim, seemed now to be a part of the irrelevant world of non-illness. Of non-illness, for it was surely not the world of health. He thought of his fears on the train and of the justification of those fears in those hideous moments on the Crannock station platform, and he thought of his sense of frustration at being unable to tell the Crooms the story of his illness and what it had meant to him.

  Standing there alone in his bright strange room, Laskell hated the room and he hated Mrs. Folger’s cheerful busyness. And then he felt what he would never have believed it possible to feel—he felt a bitter anger at Nancy Croom. Without any love at all he saw her as she stood on her lawn trying not to say what was the simple fact.

  “That you almost— That you nearly—” she had said.

  “Died” was the word, and Nancy’s face, now that no love showed its charm, appeared to Laskell in its stark irritability as he gave her the word. He saw in it all her dislike of having to accept the word—yes, even her momentary dislike of him because he had given it to her. And then he remembered, or thought he remembered, that he had seen that look before. It was when he had given the Crooms their copy o
f Theories of Housing and Nancy had glowed with pleasure at the inscription he had written in it and had impulsively kissed him. Then she had begun to examine the book with a childlike intensity, considering the jacket, the binding, the title page, and then had come to the initials E.F. on their page by themselves. She had looked at Laskell with the happiness gone from her face. He had smiled at her reassuringly to show that he was quite all right, that his grief at Elizabeth’s death was not being awakened by a friend’s looking at the initials. But now he knew that it was not in sympathy and sorrow that Nancy had looked at him but in something like disapproval. It was the way she had looked at him when, on the lawn, he had given her the simple word “died.”

  It did not put Nancy in a very pleasant light, his sudden awareness of her disapproval of death. But the perversity did not last long. There came to Laskell’s mind, unbidden but welcome because it checked his anger at Nancy, the very sound of his voice as he had said to Dr. Graf, “Do you mean that I could have died?” And Dr. Graf, with that dryness of his, had answered, “Yes, you could have, and if it gives you any satisfaction, I thought you would.”

  Dr. Graf had apparently heard “satisfaction” in Laskell’s voice. And no doubt Nancy, with her commitment to life, had heard in his voice that same satisfaction. Laskell shook his head in annoyance with himself. No, Nancy had not been evasive of death any more than she was evasive of life. She had only been even more perceptive than Laskell had always thought her and she had read his secret mind.

  And, after all, how much perception did it take? For it was not only Dr. Graf who had caught on to his satisfaction at being ill; there was Paine too. He seemed to be quite a transparent case. “I think,” Paine had said, rather archly, for although she was the most remarkable of nurses, like any nurse she was likely to speak archly and to talk to her patient as if he were in the third person as well as in the second, “I think he doesn’t want to get well.”

  Laskell had taken a kind of pride in the strange new emotions of his illness, especially in that odd little experience with the flower, but he had no pride now as the real meaning of that rose-business broke in upon him. Quite a love affair with that flower, Paine had said. Quite a love affair with non-existence. That involvement with the rose, that desire that wanted nothing—what was it if it was not the image of death? Or, if not of death, then of not being born, which is but the gentler image of death? It was not quite extinction that he had taken such a fancy to, but it was something just short of extinction. It was the removal of all the adverse conditions of the self, the personality living in nothing but delight in itself. It was what the philosophers used to suppose of the existence of God and of the union of the self with God, and it was much like what the psychologists now imagined of unborn children laid up in the encompassing heaven of the womb, unwilling to be dragged forth.

  Quite a love affair with that flower, quite a love affair with death! It was something for a man like John Laskell to have to face. He had committed himself to the most hopeful and progressive aspects of modern life, planning their image in public housing developments, defending them in long dull meetings of liberals and radicals. And yet he had been able to practice this large deception on himself, had been willing to think of his days in bed as having some large value because they had so completely rested his mind and will. All Nancy had done to arouse his unjust anger at her had been to see through the deception and refuse to be a party to it. It was something for a man like John Laskell to have to face. But he did face it.

  Then, with this much self-knowledge gained, Laskell began to get what seemed like a clue to his terror on the station platform. Was that not the other side of the image of death or of not being born?—the moment when the foetus conceives of the womb no longer as the perfect place where desire and gratification are one, but as a hideous imprisoning box; it struggles to escape from the living death which that enclosure is, where it must lie silent and tongueless; the cry of anguish that it gives, the expression of suffering on its face, are not its resistance to being born into the light, but rather its inexpressible terror of the danger it has just escaped. What had happened to him on the station platform was perhaps the painful end of that pleasant illness of his, his sudden terror that he would not escape the state of being unborn.

  It could be thought of that way, and Laskell decided that that was the way he would think of it.

  He filled the washbasin from the big white pitcher of tepid water and washed his hands. He poured the dirty water into the large crockery slop jar. He rinsed the basin and poured out the rinsing water. He took off his sweaty shirt and his undershirt and hung them in the closet. He laid out a fresh shirt and undershirt. He filled the basin again and soaped his face and neck, his chest and his armpits. He did all this with a pedantic thoroughness. He was insisting to himself that life was really a matter of routine, of clean face and neck and ears and shirts, not of such betrayals of the mind as led to being in love with death or to such things as the madness and treachery of Gifford Maxim. He looked at himself in the mirror, a familiar enough sight. But the face was not wholly familiar. He could not make his own usual objection to it, that it was not serious or firm enough, for the eyes seemed to be looking out of the mirror with a kind of anger.

  It was while he was washing and trying to prove the world reasonable that Laskell’s blood froze with the voice he heard.

  It came from directly below his window, from the porch. Laskell stood with his face covered with suds and his hands still about his neck, his scrubbing suspended. He listened to the sound and followed it. For it could be followed. It began very low, a human voice beginning very low and reasonable, a colloquial utterance, very social, extremely polite. And then it rose to a high pitch of querulousness, going fast at first and then much slower, as if it were arguing, explaining, asking, deprecating.

  But it said nothing. For the sounds were not words although they fell just short of words. Laskell stood there with the suds itching as they dried on his skin. His heart was frozen. The voice was terrible in its imitation of human reason. It was sad and grieved, it did not complain but simply communicated its grievance to all the world, and what made it so much more frightening was that Laskell believed that he could detect more than grievance in it. It almost seemed to him that the voice was expressing the grievance of others, was commiserating with others, speaking of their sorrow, for the sorrow of other deprived minds. And this power of generalization, this appeal, as it were, to justice, was more terrifying than anything else.

  The voice rose and fell, making its explanations, sometimes inaudible, sometimes very loud and full. It expected no answer.

  But in a while it received an answer. There came the whining of hounds, puzzled, miserable, then a deep growling that broke out into a long full-throated baying, interrupted by sharp little barks. The voice rose and fell, rose and fell in its imitation of human reason, and the hounds mingled their voices with it. The hounds were, in a manner, speaking—and it seemed to Laskell that they were uttering their deep unhappiness at their condition of being hounds, as if, hopelessly, desperately, they, together with the mad person, were struggling to be human.

  Laskell knew whose voice it was. And again he felt a hard rigid anger at Arthur and Nancy. For they must have known that the old man was mad, that his faculties were gone, reduced to this vocal idiocy. And yet they had allowed their admiration for the Folgers to lead them to forget what the old man was like and had arranged for their friend to live with this horror. There had been too much horror in the day for him. It was only twenty-four hours ago that Gifford Maxim had sat in Laskell’s room and spoken about the necessity for him to establish an existence, a man who, once shining with reason and morality, was now bereft of loyalty and mind; it was only an hour ago that Laskell himself had had that shocking experience on the station platform.

  With the speed of fear Laskell rinsed his face of the soap, dried it, and put on his shirt, his fingers scarcely able to manage the buttonholes. Th
e voice was keeping up its insane exposition of grief and injustice, its effort to comfort those who shared in the suffering of this injustice, and the hounds were joining in with their deep voices.

  Laskell went down the stairs and found his way through the little hall to the dining-room where he had first been received here. He looked out through the screen door. The old man was indeed sitting there, but he was just sitting there, rocking quietly in his rocker. All that he was doing with his mouth was smiling a little as he watched the three hounds lift their muzzles to his companion, a big heavy man sitting on the edge of the porch.

  This man was talking to the hounds, and the hounds were listening enthralled, and were answering him as best they could. Their feet were braced and their throats were tense. And as the man’s voice sank they growled a little, and as it rose they began to whine, and then they yelped delicately as the voice rose louder still, until from their throats came a deep melodious howl which would then sink back to an anticipatory growl, and then the gamut would be run again. The man was making a sound like a dog, a good-natured and even witty dog who had somehow just been learning human speech and was using it to the other dogs, who understood it but could not themselves quite use it.

  “Wurra marra,” the man growled. “Wurra marra, huh? Wurra marra wirra dirra? Warra dirra, warra dirra? Way-ra dirra, way-ra dirra, way-ra dirra forra poo—oo—oo—oo—rrr boys?” He was speaking to them about their dinner, as they well knew. “What’s the matter?” he was saying. “What’s the matter, huh? What’s the matter with the dinner? Want your dinner, want your dinner? Where’s the dinner, where’s the dinner, where’s the dinner for the poor boys?” And as he growled and bayed at the poor boys, he pulled their long ears and chucked their heads about, and they answered him with their ecstasy of affection, communication, and hunger, their rumps and their tails never still.

  In the weeks that Laskell was to spend with the Folgers he would come to listen to this “mad” conversation with the greatest pleasure. Alwin Folger talking to his dogs, to his old horse Harold, to his cows, was something that would never fail to delight him. He would hear it from the barn at the morning milking, that endless conversation that had in it the perfect comic belief that all the animal creation could be communicated with. The mornings were quite cool, almost cold, and Laskell would lie half awake under the blankets and quilts listening to that strange cheerful talk.