Laskell did not try to deal with their incredulity. He simply sat and waited for it to pass. The story had yet to be told and its difficulty pressed upon him.
Arthur put aside childish things, laying the pocket-knife and the block of wood on the sofa beside him. He had the set, strong, and chastened look of a man who has just had information of the highest importance which does not at that very moment affect his personal life, although, as he well knows, it must eventually touch him adversely in some personal way. Yet the event is so great, so dramatic, that he cannot but feel a pleasure in his excitement, which he tries to suppress. Arthur Croom had probably looked not much different at the moment he had learned of the Reichstag fire. He and Nancy for a moment had nothing to say. If Gifford Maxim had been susceptible to compliment—but that was impossible—nothing could have flattered him more than the silence in which they sat.
In retrospect Laskell knew that the Crooms were not at all pleased with him for being the bearer of such news. And even as he told the story—or rather, as the Crooms put their questions to him afterward—he had to resist the feeling that he was telling a story on himself rather than about Maxim. But he did resist it. A particular tone came into his voice as he answered their questions, a note of strictness and even of irony. It was this note in his own voice that made him aware that his sense of time, his feeling about the future, had really changed. The Crooms seemed to be asking their questions with the assumption that if everything was not right and clear about Gifford Maxim, neither was everything right and clear about John Laskell. And ordinarily he would have let them rest in this assumption until it should pass of itself, as of course it would have done. He would have been sympathetic to their need to blame someone, to hold someone accountable immediately, a need so pressing that they were even willing temporarily to hold Laskell accountable. He would have been willing to let them impute some guilt to himself of which he could be sure the future would clear him. But tonight he resisted this impulse to feel guilty, and he repelled the Crooms’ imputations—unconscious imputations, of course—at the very moment they were uttered, not waiting for the future to set them right.
Thus, when he told them about the trip with Maxim, he explained about Maxim’s choosing the last car and the last seat in the last car and said, “He did that so that no one could come at him from behind.”
At this Nancy said, “Did he say that was why he did it?”
Laskell answered, “No, not in so many words. All he said was, ‘This is the place for me.’”
Nancy said, “And you thought that that meant he would be attacked? Why should you think such a thing?”
Laskell said, “I didn’t think he would be attacked. I thought that he thought he would be attacked.” And his voice was clear and firm. It required Nancy to understand the truth now, at this very moment; it refused to allow her to indulge even for a short time the relief she might find in supposing him in the wrong.
The question of Maxim’s belief in the possibility of attack led the Crooms to the question of Maxim’s sanity, for when Laskell explained very precisely that the idea of the attack was not his but Maxim’s, Nancy said, “Oh—he’s mad. I mean really—he’s insane.”
She had expressed that view before. She had listened in silence to Laskell’s account of the visit up through its climax, heard in horror Maxim’s belief that he did not exist, that in order to be safe he needed a public certification such as Kermit Simpson’s magazine would give him. She had barely been able to take it in. She had been incredulous when she had heard that Maxim had broken with the Party. She had sat silent, looking puzzled and annoyed when Laskell told of what and of whom Maxim was afraid, much as if she were listening to some new conception of the universe so abstract that it was hopeless for her to put her mind to it. She had said nothing until Laskell came to the detail of Maxim’s having slept on the roof. Then she had said, “Why did he do that?”
And Laskell had answered, “Presumably for safety.”
At this she had cried out, “Why, the man’s insane! He is, isn’t he, John?”
Laskell had said, “It certainly occurred to me to think so.”
Nancy had then used the word not quite literally, meaning perhaps no more by it than that Maxim was mistaken in the extreme. But now she was quite literal, entirely clinical. She said in a very literal voice, “He is insane, isn’t he, John?”
“Well—” Laskell paused to consider.
“Don’t you think so? You said you thought so.”
“Yes, at the time the idea did come to me, in a way.”
“In a way? At the time? Don’t you think so now?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? But you said so. You were with him. You heard him say those things. You yourself heard him say he was in danger. You said he slept on the roof and that he was afraid of being attacked from the rear. He’s obviously insane.”
Arthur said, “I doubt if you’ll get very far in politics, Nan, with the language of individual psychopathology.”
“I’m not talking about politics,” Nancy said irritably. “I’m talking about Gifford Maxim. If insanity isn’t the opposite of reason, what is it?”
Arthur said as gently as possible, “But think how many people talk about the German developments as if they are to be understood in terms of individual psychopathology.”
“And so they are! That and the weakness and vacillation of the Social Democrats.” She said to Laskell, “What is he, if he isn’t insane?”
Laskell had not thought of the alternatives before, but he considered them now. “He might be mistaken,” he said slowly. “Or he might be deliberately lying.” And then, merely in the way of the next step in a series of possibilities, “Or he might be right,” he said.
“You think he might be right?” Nancy said. “My God, John!
And Arthur said very gravely, even a little sternly, “Do you really, John?”
It was, of course, a very important question. He did not answer quickly. “I didn’t say so. I was only stating all the possibilities. I’m simply not sure that we can finish off by saying that he’s insane.”
“No, I agree with you,” Arthur said. “But if he’s not insane, what is the matter with him? What could have led him to this?”
Again Laskell hesitated. “You must remember that he’s a professional—that he was a professional,” he corrected himself with a smile. “Lenin said that for effective revolutionary action there must be a small group of professionals. Giff knew a great deal and was very deeply committed. That’s why he seemed so important to us, isn’t it? After all, we’ve been nothing but liberals and perhaps that’s all we’ll ever be. That’s all right, but it means that we pretty much limit ourselves to ideas—and ideals. When we act, if we can call it action, it’s only in a peripheral way. We do have sympathies with the Party, and even, in a way, with its revolutionary aims. But maybe, sympathetic as we are, we prefer not to think about what the realities of such a party are.”
Arthur said in a very quiet voice, “Then you’re saying in effect that Maxim was telling the truth. And apparently you’re basing your belief on the assumption of a conspiratorial party. But surely you wouldn’t say that that assumption stands up? You don’t actually think he was telling the truth, do you?”
“No,” said Laskell. “I didn’t say I did.”
A silence fell now, one of the many silences of that evening. It was no longer possible for Laskell to evade the fact that, in the Crooms’ eyes, he was touched with Maxim’s guilt. Not that they were precisely blaming him for anything, but they felt that he had been led into error somehow. And waiting out the silence as he suddenly could, Laskell thought how much of life was being conducted as a transaction between guilt and innocence. Even among people who were devoted only to ideas of progress and social equality and not at all to action, there had grown an unusual desire to discover who was innocent and who was guilty, who could be trusted and who needed to be watched. This was
strange when one reflected on how much the idea of personal responsibility had been shaken by modern social science. Educated people more and more accounted for human action by the influence of environment and the necessities and habits imposed by society. Yet innocence and guilt were more earnestly spoken of than ever before.
Laskell remembered the strange confessions of the great Commissars, the former heroes of the Revolution of 1917, which were so difficult to understand, not because it was inconceivable that the men should be guilty—their guilt, after some doubt, had become quite clear to Laskell—but because the spiritual quality of what they said was so little in accord with an age of reason, because the defendants were so deeply involved, as their speeches of confession showed, with the idea of personal guilt. It was an apparent contradiction in Marx’s Capital, that would some day be worth putting his mind to, that in the great chapters on the working day the industrial middle class was denounced on moral grounds, although in a preface the writer had explicitly exempted individual industrialists from moral censure, saying with an almost gracious reassurance that it was not they but the historical process that must be blamed. And the events in Germany would seem to show that even among those terrible people there was the preoccupation with guilt and innocence—so many words to explain the wrongs done to them, for the wronged and the weak are the innocent; so much cruelty to separate themselves from the guilty, for those who are punished are guilty and those who punish are innocent; so much adoration of strength, for the strong who once were weak are never guilty.
Arthur broke the silence. “John, I’d like to ask one question,” he said in a frank voice. “Why did you wait until now to tell us this?”
And Nancy said, “Yes, John. Why did you?”
It was the question that Laskell had of course been waiting for, and in a way it was a relief to have it asked, to have the charge made.
He decided to lie. “I don’t know why I did. It was pretty unpleasant, after all. I just didn’t want to talk about it.”
They accepted the explanation generously. Arthur nodded in understanding. Nancy said, “I can see that. It’s a horror, no matter how you look at it. But you should have told us.”
But of course he had not yet told them anything. He had told them only that Maxim had come to him with the information that he had broken with the Party, that he feared for his life and wished to establish an existence, that he had slept on the roof and taken the train with Laskell, choosing the last car of the train and the last seat in the car because he feared an attack from the rear. And the true story was so much more than this. The true whole story was so much more than the mere record of the facts of Maxim’s defection. It was that Laskell had been sick and that he had been deeply involved with himself and two nurses, that he had been inexplicably interested in questions of being, in questions of his own existence, and that he had become well and bickered endlessly with Paine; it was that he had thought of Arthur Croom and Maxim as contradictory but complementary parts of political life; it was that Maxim had come in when he and Paine were quarreling about his taking his fishing gear, when Paine had been encouraging him to this assertion of health. Then they ought to know certain things about his feelings in connection with Maxim, such as his sense of submitting to a procès-verbal when Maxim talked to him, and his absurd notion of the great mural figures that went around with Maxim. Then there was Maxim’s trick of bringing out the photograph, and Maxim’s claim upon him, that very special claim which he had not realized until after Maxim had gone. And there was the farewell to Paine.
These things, under almost any circumstances, were not easy to talk about, yet he had been in the habit of talking with the Crooms about difficult matters, though not usually difficult personal matters. But the point was that this was the story they had all along not wished to hear—the story of his illness which was so much a part of the Maxim story. Of the true story he had so far given them only a little official version.
“I think,” he said, “that I was even more disturbed than you might guess, and for reasons you wouldn’t know. It was, as a personal experience, very shaking.”
“It must have been,” Nancy said softly. “You looked dreadful when you got here. I was frightened by the way you looked. And you weren’t yourself. You were very strange. I said so to Arthur—I said you seemed not like yourself at all. And now I scarcely wonder, traveling with that—” Unable to name Maxim, she was even unable to characterize him. “Yes, I can understand your not talking about it.”
So Nancy forgave him for not talking about it on his arrival? Laskell smiled. “It’s more than that, Nancy. You see, I’ve known Maxim longer than you have, and I’ve known him in a different way. You think of him politically. I sup-pose I’ve thought of him that way too for quite a while now. But I’ve known him in a different way. I suppose it’s important in the way I felt. I suppose it’s important in the way I felt that Maxim suddenly produced an old snapshot of Elizabeth that he said he wanted to return to me.” Laskell lit a cigarette. “It was the picture I showed you this morning, Nancy.”
He saw Nancy’s face set. He had expected it would. Her voice was very precise as she said, “Yes. But why?”
“You mean, why did he show me Elizabeth’s picture? I don’t know, really. But I can guess several reasons. He may have wanted to confuse my emotions. If I could give you an idea of his manner that afternoon, you would understand what I mean. It seemed as if every smallest thing he did or said had an intention. Or perhaps he wanted to remind me of the past—to make me emotional so that I wouldn’t have my wits about me. Or—” Laskell paused; he realized his hands were trembling. “Or perhaps he only wanted to make it real to me.”
Nancy said, “Make it real to you? Make what real?”
“That people do actually die.”
Arthur said briskly, “Aren’t you being a little hypersubtle? A little too psychological?”
Laskell shrugged. “Maybe so. But we aren’t exactly in a context of simplicities, are we?” Laskell waited just a fraction of a moment, then he said, “It may be, of course, that his motive was much simpler. He may have wanted to remind me of a claim he had on me for my help.”
Nancy had put down her knitting some time back. She was sitting with her feet neatly together and her knees neatly together and her hands tightly clasped on her knees, her head bent over her hands. She had been looking at her clasped hands. Now she looked up sharply.
“A claim on you? What kind of claim could he have on you?” Her voice was cold and even. “I should think that after what he told you, all claims would be at an end. At an end immediately.”
“It was a personal claim—he was very good to me after Elizabeth died.”
“Oh.” Nancy picked up her knitting.
Well, it had been done. The “claim” and Elizabeth’s death had been brought together. They had been spoken in one sentence. Never before in his life had Laskell said anything to anybody in order to see if it would produce a particular response. He was stricken and ashamed that he should have done it first with Nancy. He had introduced the mention of the snapshot to test her. She had not passed the test. He had introduced the claim Maxim had on him, again to try her response. She had responded badly. She had disclosed herself as he had maneuvered her to—she had disclosed her deficiency of emotion, her fear of talking about the dead Elizabeth.
But his own intention had been mean and coarse, and Laskell would now have given much to be out of the system of innocence and guilt to which he too consented by testing his friends. How had he allowed Nancy to move so far out of his system of love, how had he put her into this system of accusation? But now accuse her he must. “Claims” were of the past, the dead were of the past. They had no place in Nancy’s bright, shining future, and he, Laskell, by giving them place in his thought, had committed what amounted to an obscenity. It was what he had been suspecting ever since his arrival in the country and now he had his proof. When it came to acquiring significant information for the
dossier, he was a perfect little Maxim of an interrogator. A great weight settled on his spirit.
It was Nancy who resumed the conversation. She said, “John, you said that you hadn’t seen Maxim for a year and that you thought he was angry at you because you had refused to do something he had asked you to do. What was it you refused to do? Why did you refuse?” Her voice was soft and rather tired.
Arthur said reasonably, “John had no commitment, Nan. He’s helped with particular things, just as we’ve done, when our views have happened to coincide with the Party’s—specific issues, like free speech or relief for political prisoners, things like that.”
“Yes. Of course,” said Nancy quietly. “I wasn’t blaming John. I just wanted to know what and why.”
“I’ll tell you what I refused,” Laskell said. “But I’m not sure I can tell you why. Gifford asked me if I would receive certain letters addressed to me and addressed in a particular way that would distinguish them from the rest of my mail, and then turn them over to him, or to someone he would send, without opening them.”
Arthur said, “Oh, that! Yes—he asked us the same thing. We refused too. I have no doubt the thing was perfectly all right, but the element of secrecy put me off. So we said no.”
How enviable it was, the easy, guiltless way Arthur spoke of his refusal. His naturally political temperament permitted him to grant or refuse requests according to nothing but reason.
“What do you suppose all the secrecy was about?” Laskell asked.
Arthur shrugged. “That was Maxim’s business. I don’t know and I didn’t ask.”
“He said that his work was special and secret. Those were the words he used, ‘special and secret.’ He made a point of saying that it had nothing to do with organizations or strikes. But when I asked him what it did have to do with, he wouldn’t say. He just repeated that it was special and secret. But he did admit that the letters had something to do with whatever was ‘special and secret.’ What do you suppose it was?”
The Middle of the Journey Page 20