“I suppose you know the story of how the gypsy moth first came to this country,” Laskell said. It was Laskell’s one fact in entomology and he was pleased to be able to impart it. Mr. Folger looked at the road as if it might suddenly be developing hidden dangers that could wreck the car. “It isn’t native to America, you know. A French naturalist was trying to improve American silkworms, he thought he could breed them with a certain European moth, so he imported some eggs and he reared the caterpillars in an enclosure to keep them from escaping. But a storm came up. It broke his screens and some of the caterpillars got away. I guess it took about ten years for anything to happen. That was back in the eighties. But the caterpillars appeared. The insects had just been getting used to the country. It took them nearly twenty years to spread, and even now they’re thickest in Massachusetts.”
Whether or not Mr. Folger found this interesting was not clear. He gave no other response than to take the car with an increased care through the cruel reefs that lay ahead. It was his way of receiving Laskell’s story, not exactly an enthusiastic reception, yet Laskell did not feel that his offering had been entirely snubbed.
The town of Crannock was very small. Its residences were chiefly outlying, but it was truly a town if only because it had a little common, rather scrawny but not without charm, and even not without continuing use, for at one end was a bandstand. There were large trees on the common, and a small school stood at one side.
Mr. Folger’s business was with a carpenter, and while he went about it Laskell stopped in at the drugstore, not because he needed the toothpaste and soap he bought but to occupy the time. The drugstore was dark as he remembered drugstores of his childhood, and it smelled twenty years back of drugs and of soap-perfumes that were long outmoded. The man who waited on him was not a clerk but a druggist, a scholarly looking man. And as Laskell went out with his purchase, even the striking force of the sunlight reminded him of the sudden light he had always experienced, in his childhood, on emerging from the special darkness of a drugstore.
He strolled about, waiting for Mr. Folger, feeling oddly contented and happy, as if he were in a foreign town. In a side street—but it was scarcely a street at all, just a different direction in which the boxlike structure of three stores faced—he saw what was called a tavern, a long narrow room, even darker than the drugstore. From it came a smell of beer. He was about to go in and then he decided to wait for Mr. Folger. His invitation would be something that Mr. Folger would have to deal with directly. He looked forward to forcing Mr. Folger’s diplomatic reserve.
But Mr. Folger, when he appeared with his slow, discreet bearing, turned out to be in the tradition of socialism that looked upon the workingman’s glass of beer with a doctrinal tolerance. “I don’t mind if I do,” he said politely and went ahead of Laskell into the tavern. If he had any reserve in the matter it was shown by his stationing himself at the near end of the long bar, where the window lighted it. Back where it was so dark that, at first entrance, one could scarcely make out the figures, there was a group of men.
There were four men, and as his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, Laskell saw that one of them was Duck. And Duck was quite the center of their interest. When he began to speak, their heads leaned forward to catch what he was saying in a low voice, and when he finished, their heads went back in laughter. It was a rather extravagant, histrionic laughter which, with its slapping of thighs or of bar, was intended to demonstrate that the laugher was laughing. But when they laughed the three men were together among themselves, apart from Duck. They responded as he wanted them to, but they remained superior to him. It was as if he were imparting to them some wisdom and wit whose value they recognized, although they scorned him for having it.
Duck was drunk. He stood facing the bar, erect, a man whose sense of worldly ease, coming from what he has drunk and from old images of himself, can be taken from him at any moment. He continually made a little cocking gesture of his head, a small sidewise toss, and he raised his eyebrows in a quick understanding way, as one who knows the world and disdains or is indifferent to what he sees.
Mr. Folger ordered beer and Laskell had the same. Mr. Folger raised his glass and bowed over it before drinking. There was a large stag’s head over the back of the bar and Mr. Folger’s bow seemed to offer courtesy to the stag, but Laskell returned it. He liked Mr. Folger very much.
One of the men at the other end of the bar leaned over Duck’s shoulder to disturb the conscious isolation in which he stood. The man said something in an inaudible voice and gave Duck a poke. Duck looked modest and even shy. But at last, with a shrug, he consented. The three men drew around him. He must have been telling his story well, for the men drew nearer and nearer to catch his words. When they were as close as he wanted them to be, his voice became more distinct. This made it seem rather foolish of them to be crowding up to a man who spoke to them in a loud clear voice.
Laskell heard the words, “And her maybe three months gone, maybe more ...” Then he heard, “... lays one hand on her belly ...” At this point Duck stopped his narrative and made a demonstration. He protruded his belly and laid one hand hard upon it. He went on, “And then he lays one hand on her tit.” And Duck clapped himself avidly on the breast. He held both hands in place, acting both the man and the woman. He stood there in demonstration, lifting each hand and clapping it down again on himself to show how it had been done.
“Wahoo!” cried one of his listeners in conventional but intense enthusiasm.
“Yowee!” said another.
Duck surveyed his effect calmly. “And then ...” Duck said and his voice dropped again, the heads were bent to him. Then his voice lifted in a calfish bellow of passion, “‘Nancy darling,’” he said. He answered himself in a falsetto bleat. “‘Oh, Arthur, please!’” He surveyed his success and said, “And then, what do you think he does?” His voice dropped again and when he finished there was the extreme explicit laughter.
But as the men laughed they had an understanding among themselves from which the performer was excluded. The information about life which they had received was interesting and valuable to them, but they looked down on the man who had such information to impart.
Mr. Folger was not looking at the group, nor was he looking at Laskell. He looked into his glass of beer, criticizing it. He was uncomfortable that Laskell’s friends were being discussed.
Duck snapped his fingers three times in the direction of the man in charge of the bar, who drew four glasses of beer and took them down to the group.
Mr. Folger did all that could be done at the moment. At least he did all that could be done by the method of diplomacy. He directed his gaze and voice to the shabby head of the stag. “There is a kind of man,” he said to the stag, “there is a kind of man, even his own wife isn’t sacred to him. Even his own wife.”
It tactfully opened such depths of Duck that the present incident could almost be lost in them.
Just then Duck turned, as if to take cognizance of the possibility that there might be someone else at the bar. But it was not Mr. Folger and Laskell that his eyes rested on. His wife had come in.
Emily Caldwell had paused for a moment just over the threshold. It was the only place in the long narrow room which the sunlight reached and she seemed very conspicuous with her yellow print dress and her bright coronet of braids. Duck stood and lowered at her, waiting for her to come closer. She did not hurry. Nor did she ignore Mr. Folger and Laskell. “How do you do, Mr. Folger, Mr. Laskell,” she said, giving them for an instant all her attention. She walked the length of the bar, and the men watched her approaching, knowing what she had come for.
It was a bad situation for any woman to be in, a wife coming to take a man away from his companions for his own good. Emily nodded to Duck’s friends, casually and pleasantly. And as they nodded back, their nods carried them into a subtle shift of position that made their group stand separate from Duck.
Emily said, “Come, dear, we must go.”
“In a minute, in a minute,” Duck said. He made the point of dignity by not looking at her. He turned elaborately to the glass of beer on the bar. “I have a drink to finish.”
But she was too quick for him, for she reached out and took up the glass of beer before his slowly moving hand could encompass it. “That’s easy,” she said. “If you don’t mind.” And she raised the glass and drank half of it. “I was so thirsty,” she said to her husband and his friends. And “See, I’ve drunk it all, such a pig,” she said when she had drained the glass very competently.
She held up the glass for them all to see. She had compounded whatever sin the three companions thought they were committing, she was not judging them or her husband. She said to Duck, “We must go or we’ll be late.”
What appointment she and her husband could be presumed to have and what force punctuality could have in their casual country life did not seem to matter to her. Business or social engagements called them away, so sorry to have to run off—her manner insisted that this was the case. She involved the whole situation in this social manner; it was foolish but it hid from sight the wife snatching her husband from a bar under the very eyes of his friends. The men might snicker at her when she left but they could not regard her with cold hostility any more. Yet nothing she could do saved her husband from his raging shame. He glared at her, his face swollen with anger. At last he brought himself to speak. “Go ahead,” he said, looking at her intently, with a kind of scientific curiosity, holding his gaze upon her, his mouth pulled back tight at the corners to show that he regarded her with a disgusted objectivity.
She turned and went. As she passed Mr. Folger and Laskell she nodded good-by. She did not look defeated. And she had no reason to, for Duck, when he had picked up his glass, looked at its emptiness with profound irony, drained the few drops of foam left in it, and carefully set it on the bar, followed Emily out of the tavern without a word to his friends.
Mr. Folger addressed himself to the stag. “Not an easy life,” he said. “I wouldn’t say she had an easy life at all.”
Laskell liked Mr. Folger so much that he ventured a suggestion. “Do you think we ought to give them a lift?”
One of the tines of the stag’s antlers was broken off and Mr. Folger seemed to be commenting adversely on this defect as he said, “I guess not.”
And Laskell liked him well enough to believe that Mr. Folger was not only expressing a disinclination from implicating himself, and the car consecrated to Miss Walker, with the Caldwells, but also, perhaps, a kind of delicacy, a feeling that the Caldwells had best now be alone. On the drive home they passed the Croom car driven very slowly by Emily Caldwell with Duck asleep in the seat beside her.
If the incident made any changes in Laskell’s view of things, it was not in his view of Duck—his opinion of Duck could only remain what it had been before—but in the way he saw Nancy. He sat with her the next morning as she knelt before the flower border at the north side of the house. She was pulling weeds and loosening the earth around the asters. Her pregnancy seemed more apparent today. Perhaps that was because it had been so notably referred to in the tavern yesterday. Or it may have been because Nancy seemed suddenly so very young to be a mother—so young to be so very involved in life. She was involved up to her ears, with a child here and a child to come, with husband and house, with her own trimness and efficiency, and then with her full, generous hope that all she had and all she was could be what the world had—she was too modest to hope that the world could be as she was, but Laskell could hope it for her. And what she did hope for she was passionately sure would come, for she knew that most people had her own clarity of spirit. It was a very large faith, a very large involvement with life.
But now Laskell saw her as he had never seen her before—in an aura of self-deception. It was that which made her so very girlish today, for after all she was twenty-six. She was like some thoughtful adolescent who utters a starry sentiment that she has learned at home or at school, from a good but mistaken parent or teacher; she sets her chin sternly against any knowledge of the world in which she will have to make her sentiment prevail, and the sternness of her self-deceiving pose of maturity makes her seem even younger than she really is. For the desire to refuse knowledge of the evil and hardness of the world can often shine in a face like a glow of youth.
What Nancy talked about quite confirmed Laskell’s new sense of her. She put down her hand rake, pushed back her hair, and turned on her knees to him.
“John,” she said seriously, “I want to ask you something.”
Her youthfulness appeared here in her intense seriousness and he could not help teasing her. “Please feel, Mrs. Croom, that you can speak freely to me.”
“No,” she said quietly. “I’m serious. John, tell me—do you think we could have a rock-garden next year? Would it look silly?”
“You have one already,” Laskell said. For there was a pile of the large stones that Nancy had collected from her flower beds.
“Seriously, John. Would it look silly?”
“No more silly than any other kind of garden.”
“You know,” said Nancy, “there are certain kinds of rock flowers that I like better than any other flowers in the world. But I don’t know. Maybe it would look silly.”
“What are you talking about?” said Laskell. “Silly in what way? If you like them.”
“I mean inappropriate. I’ve always associated rock-gardens with suburban homes, even estates. And this is such a simple community. It might look funny. You know—affected.” She was quite shy about it.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Nancy!”
But Nancy seemed scarcely to notice the interruption. “I’d like to think of this as really our home—our place. I love the people here, but naturally they have their own ideas about things. And even small things that one does can make them uncomfortable.” Then she added, “As it were,” as if there would have been a disloyalty in her meaning it too literally.
“In that case,” Laskell said, “I should think you’d have to give up thinking of this as really your home.”
“I won’t!” she said. The quick refusal, the stubbornly outthrust chin, made Laskell smile. She really was like an independent child. But he thought of the scene in the tavern and Nancy’s opinion of Duck and knew that an independent child was not enough to be, not as the world was.
“Did you ever have a rock-garden?” he said.
“When I was a little girl we had one. My mother was mad about it, spent hours on it.”
The memory of that seemed to reassure her, as if it told her that she was not asserting a whim but affirming a tradition. She sat silent, presumably thinking of rock-gardens.
Laskell said, “I drove to town with Mr. Folger yesterday afternoon.”
“Did you? Isn’t he the finest person?”
“I like him very much. We stopped and had a glass of beer together. I saw your Duck there.”
“My Duck? Yes, he borrowed the car yesterday.”
“He was drunk.”
Nancy sighed elaborately. “He just can’t drink,” she said. Her tone was elegiac, and like an elegy it mourned the hard fact, accepted it, and was reconciled to it in the end. Laskell, who suspected that he had already said too much, would not have gone on if Nancy had not explained, “It’s his weakness, but there’s something wonderful about him, a quality of life, a kind of unexpressed affirmation.”
He stared at her. “You really think so?”
And she, catching the real question in his tone, stared back at him hostilely. “You know, John,” she said in a considered way, “I begin to think you have a prejudice against Duck.” She held up a hand to stop any disclaimer he might make. “Yes, I think you have. You’ve never talked to him and yet whenever his name comes up, it seems to me that there is a kind of antagonism in you. I know you well enough, John, to know what you’re feeling, even when you don’t say anything.” It was likely to be true. Still, it was surprising
to him that she should have been able to read his feelings about Duck.
“He’s a very important kind of person,” Nancy continued, “even if you don’t consider him just personally. It’s not like you to judge a person without knowing him.”
There was nothing he could say. He could scarcely mention the single concrete fact he might use in evidence against Duck—he could not tell Nancy about Duck in the tavern. And because the evidence could not be used, it lost some of its value. Perhaps one could not judge a man by an incident, however distasteful it seemed. Best to surrender his stand, and maybe, indeed, there was no need for a stand at all. All he said was, “Perhaps you’re right.”
“I know I’m right, John,” Nancy said gently. She was willing to let the subject drop.
For a while Nancy gardened in silence. Then she asked, “Are you fond of flowers, John?”
It was one of those things that one friend can say to another only under such country circumstances—while one of them worked and the other idled, in the open air, with plenty of time ahead, with no particular concentration on each other, not wanting any special answer or any answer at all. It came like a greeting and suggested how valuable life could be without struggle, or ideas, or commitments. A hundred, a thousand other questions could be asked that would have the effect of making two people as simple and without strain as Laskell suddenly felt that he and Nancy were. It seemed to him that such conversations could go on forever. “Are you fond of flowers?” “Do you like dogs?” “Do you like whisky?” “Do you like to read poetry?” And there were untold numbers of answers. “Yes, I am quite fond of flowers and my favorites are peonies but I also have a great feeling for delphinium.” “Yes, I like dogs. If I had one, I would have an Irish terrier. I’ve also thought of dachshunds. Schnauzers I don’t like, nor boxers, nor Scotch terriers. But I’d only have a dog if I lived in the country.” It could go on forever.
It would have been better if, lying there on the ground, with his hands clasped under his head, he had just stayed with one of those imbecile answers to Nancy’s question, one of those responses that gently said no more than that he was alive and she was alive and that they were aware of this fact about each other. But instead he said, “It’s funny you ask. Because I never gave it a thought until I got sick. But while I was sick I seem to have got myself enormously involved with a flower. It was a rose.”
The Middle of the Journey Page 15