And then all at once he saw what was happening, that Nancy had supposed that the first line of Michael Drayton’s poem was John Laskell’s own declaration. Her wide eyes, her sudden paleness, her sharply indrawn breath showed that she thought he had announced the end of their friendship.
Laskell spoke the rest of the poem as fast as possible. He rather rattled out the lines, exaggerated his manner, made it unmistakably clear that he was speaking from someone else’s impulse, not from his own, that he meant only to cite an example. But even as he was hurrying through the poem, he understood not only that Nancy had taken it to be himself speaking, but also that he had chosen this poem of parting from among all the sonnets he knew by heart because he and she were so opposed to each other.
He reached the last couplet with its offer of the last saving chance for Love gasping on its deathbed—
“Now, if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might’st him yet recover.”
He added in an effort of self-burlesque, “Orthodox sonnet of the Shakespearean type.” But his voice was tired and even now he could not exclude all earnestness from it as he said, “And I hope that explains the principle of fishing for trout to the young lady in the back row, and if it doesn’t, she can see me after class.”
He was trying to throw the whole matter away, as far from them as he could. He received as reward Nancy’s rather bleak smile of recognition.
And certainly their mood returning from the picnic was not as gay as their mood in setting out. That was of course to be expected of any picnic, more to be expected of a picnic than of any other social event. As ritual, a picnic has too much actuality in it to be satisfying for very long after its beginning, and not enough awareness of its ritualistic intention to transform the actuality. But Laskell could not set down to the inevitable last mood of picnics the feeling that existed among them as they collected the trash of their meal and folded the rugs and made their way over the field back to the car. Nancy and he had compounded their quarrel for the moment. But they had not yet said what they were quarreling about. Therefore they could not compound their quarrel fully.
On the Croom lawn the next day Arthur was surrounded by cans of paint, of oil, of turpentine. Laskell watched him as he poured white paint into a bucket, added linseed oil, stirred it deeply, and let the mixture drip from the stirring-stick. He dipped a brush, pressed out the excess paint against the side of the bucket, and lightly brushed over a clapboard of the house. The new white streak glistened in the sunlight against the suddenly gray-white of the old paint. Arthur looked critically at the streak and then called, “Oh, Duck!”
There was no answer. A strong steady hammering began inside the house. Arthur waited until it stopped and then he called again, “Oh, Duck!” There was no answer and the hammering took up again. Then it stopped and a voice said, “Yes, what is it?”
Arthur said, “Come out here a minute, Duck, and look at this, will you?”
The hammering began again. Arthur stood over the paint bucket and waited.
Duck Caldwell came out with his hammer in his hand, dark and compact, with a little lurch in his walk, like an engaging boy swaggering off a piece of mischief. Arthur said, “Duck, will you tell me if this paint is all right?”
Duck looked into the paint pot. He contemplated it a long time. The two other men said nothing while he peered into the white depths. Duck took the stick, stirred the paint about, and let it drip from the lifted stick. Then he took the brush, dipped it, and laid a streak on the clapboard above Arthur’s streak. “Little more oil,” he said.
Arthur poured a little more oil, stirred again, and held up the stick for Duck to see the rate of drip. Duck nodded. “Plenty,” he said with judicious finality.
He started back into the house with his hammer, but at the door he turned and said, “Going to paint out the green cornerboards, Mr. Croom?” His voice had suddenly a note of respectfulness, even of deference. But there was a double meaning in his smile.
Arthur looked up from stirring the paint. “No,” he said in a very cool voice.
Laskell caught something in the interchange and wondered what it meant. He sat down in a canvas chair and watched his friend at work. Arthur handled the brush well, covering a section of the clapboard quickly, working the paint into the overhang of each clapboard, picking up the surplus, smoothing out with light swift strokes. After working for a while in silence, Arthur turned and said, “Funny how this sort of thing gives me satisfaction.”
“Yes,” Laskell said. It gave him satisfaction to see his friend working, and he was glad of their friendship.
“Would you like to try?” Arthur said. “I have another brush.”
“Tom Sawyer stuff,” Laskell jeered. But he was drawn to it. “Yes, I’d like to try,” he said.
Arthur went and got the other brush and poured off a quantity of the mixed paint into a small pot. They worked side by side for a while. After a polite interval, Arthur stopped and looked at Laskell painting. He watched for a moment and said, “You do it very well.” And then he said, “Here, take this brush and give me yours. You’ll like it better.”
“This one is all right,” Laskell said. It was not a very good brush, it was stubby and stiff, but it got the paint on.
“No—that’s just an old brush I found around the place and cleaned up. This is a good one. You’ll have more fun with it.”
Laskell took the brush and Arthur waited while he tried it. It was almost uncanny the difference the new brush made. It seemed to have mind in it—to know what it was for and to want to fulfill its purpose. It was like having a living thing in his hand as he felt the bristles against the clapboard. He turned to Arthur and acknowledged the great difference. “It’s a wonderful brush,” he said.
“God-damned expensive,” said Arthur proudly.
It was an oddly gratifying kind of work and it took more skill and attention than one would suppose. But beneath the attention he had to give, Laskell felt a glow of relationship to Arthur. They did not talk but now and then they made curt comments to each other on the progress or the problems of the job. They fell into the same rhythm of painting and occasionally paused to inspect each other’s work with the eyes of indulgent criticism.
After a while Arthur said, “Did you get that crack of Duck’s?”
Laskell said, “What crack?”
“About painting out the cornerboards. He was ribbing me. He’s a shrewd article. He knew that Nancy and I had a disagreement. I wanted to paint the cornerboards white but she wants them left green. It’s crazy, it spoils the shape of the house but Nancy wants it that way. All the houses in this part of the country have green cornerboards.”
The Croom house was very small and very simple, a box of a house, but with a very happy proportion between length and height. The green cornerboards, by outlining the white walls, made the house smaller and needlessly emphatic and less elegant than if they had continued the white of the walls.
“Look better all white,” said Laskell. This elliptical form of his own speech surprised him and he sought in his mind for its reason. He found it in the manner that boys use when they are imitating in their play the simple manly manner of workmen or technicians. He remembered the flow of male affection that used to be expressed in such play, the warmth that was hidden and expressed by the brisk, masculine language of cooperation. He spoke so again. “Look a good deal better all white.”
“Of course,” said Arthur. “Nancy admits it. But she says we can’t be different from the rest. She says it would make us just summer people if we brought in our own notions of how things should be done.”
“But you are summer people, after all.”
“We are now. But suppose I lose my job? We could come up here and make out. At least as long as Nancy’s little income lasts.”
“Lose your job?” Laskell said in alarm. “Has something happened?”
Arthur’s university career had been rapid and rewarding as such c
areers go, and Laskell had always supposed that now it could only improve. But in addition to alarm, he felt an excitement as his mind rapidly calculated what sum he could make liquid to offer the Crooms as a loan.
“No, nothing’s happened,” Arthur said dubiously. “But the way things are going. I’ve been mixed up in a few things and it isn’t doing me much good with the university administration.”
Laskell was relieved but a little disappointed. As the warmth of his impulse to help the Crooms was taken from him, he felt a little annoyed that he had responded so quickly to the Crooms’ fantasy of danger. He remembered the esteem in which Arthur was held and the talk about the Washington appointment. He should not have said as lightly as he did say, “Your only danger is that they’ll decide to make you a dean or something.”
Arthur looked remote and hurt and then angry, and Laskell realized he had done wrong in refusing him his place at the center of the drama of these troubled times. But as a matter of fact what had been increasingly interesting Laskell about his friend was how remarkably Arthur flourished in these new dangerous circumstances. Until things got a good deal worse, Arthur Croom was wonderfully suited to the world. He was not a man of the ultimate future, though he borrowed a little from the ultimate future; Arthur was a man of the immediate future, one of the men who might effectually make a go of things for a while. Yet Laskell knew that he could not advance this view of Arthur against the Crooms’ own view of themselves living an enforced life of subsistence in their pretty house.
Arthur did not have a chance to argue the possibility, for Nancy came out and stood behind the two men and said, “Danger: Intellectuals at work! A very gratifying spectacle, I must say. You do it well too, John.”
“Oh, I do, do I?”
Nancy took a chair and sat down in an extreme attitude of luxurious leisure. “Let me see what it feels like to just sit while you men work. What have you been talking about?”
Arthur said over his shoulder as he went on painting, “John has just been telling me that I’m likely to be made dean. I’m in such favor with the administration.”
“There’s as much chance of that as that you’ll lose your job,” Laskell said.
“I don’t know about that.” Arthur spoke as if he had some secret knowledge.
“You’re wrong, John,” Nancy said simply. “Arthur is on every committee of protest and the students are always coming to him to sign things and speak at their meetings. He’s by no means safe.” There was so little question of it in Nancy’s mind that there was nothing more to say. She looked at her husband with admiration. She wanted a life of danger and morality and she loved Arthur for his help in supplying it.
The connection between Arthur and Laskell was broken. But it would have been broken by Nancy’s having come out to join them. Or it would have been broken by their having finished painting the stretch they were working on. Arthur went to fetch a ladder. He set the ladder against the roof and was about to go up to hook on the paint pot when Susan Caldwell came up the path to them. In her hand she had a little bundle of letters. Emily Caldwell called from the road, “We met the mailman and brought you your mail.”
Susan went to Arthur with the mail and he put down the pot of paint and took the letters from her. “Thank you, Susan,” he said.
There was a letter for Nancy and he gave it to her, reaching it out to her absently as he read a postcard for himself. “Well,” he said, “here’s a business!”
Nancy opened her letter. “What’s a business?” she said.
“This is from Kermit Simpson. He’s driving up and wants to stop over with us.”
“That’s nice,” said Nancy absently, reading her letter.
Laskell could see from Arthur’s face that it was not as nice as Nancy thought.
“He has Gifford Maxim with him,” Arthur said.
Nancy did not put aside her letter at once. But when she did put it aside, she put it aside very thoroughly, folding it and laying it with its envelope on the grass. Then she said, “You’re joking.”
“No, I’m not joking. They’re coming in a trailer.”
“What?”
“In a trailer. In Kermit’s trailer.”
“When?” said Nancy. Her voice was level. “When are they coming?”
Arthur consulted the card. “He doesn’t say. All he says is, ‘Making leisurely trip with Giff Maxim. We plan to drop in on you in about a week for a day or two. We won’t be a nuisance; we are self-sustaining. All we need is a piece of level ground for the trailer. Much to talk to you about. Greetings to you both and to John.’” And Arthur nodded toward Laskell to convey the message directly.
Nancy said very simply, “Arthur, you must stop them.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late. They’ve left already.” He consulted the other side of the card. “I can’t make out the postmark, but it’s not from Westport. Kermit must have mailed it on the way.”
“They can’t come,” Nancy said. “I won’t let them stay. You won’t let them stay, will you?”
“I don’t quite know how to tell them to go away, Nan,” Arthur said reasonably.
“‘How’?” Nancy repeated after him indignantly. “You just tell them. Just tell them they can’t stay. I don’t want to hurt Kermit’s feelings but if he puts himself in that position it will just have to be said to him. And what does he mean—‘much to talk about’? Talk about Maxim and his lies? That’s what he must mean. He’s so weak and impressionable. He’s been taken in and corrupted.”
Susan had been looking from one to the other with wide eyes, and at the word “corrupted” she blinked intelligently. She, of course, knew about corrupted. There had been the conversation with Laskell about artists. From the road her mother called her. “Come along, Susan,” Emily Caldwell said. But Susan did not hear.
“Susan, your mother’s calling you,” said Nancy. With an effort the child tore herself away. But she walked so slowly in her desire to learn about the life of moral danger that her mother had to call her again. And so Susan hastened her steps and did not learn how intense the life of moral danger could be. She did not hear the passion with which Nancy said, “I simply won’t have him near me.”
Arthur said, “None of us wants him, Nancy.”
But Laskell knew how inadequate that would be for Nancy. She had more reason than either Arthur or Laskell for not wanting Maxim. He said, “Look, Nancy—I don’t blame you for not wanting him around. But don’t exaggerate things. He hasn’t turned into a devil, he doesn’t have horns. You yourself found things to admire in that crazy essay of his. And I want to tell you—maybe I should have mentioned it before—that I was struck by a kind of honorableness he still had, even though he did desert the Party. For example, he wouldn’t tell me what his secret and special work was. I asked him if he wanted to tell me and he made a point of saying no.”
It was the best he could do to give Nancy the reassurance he knew she needed that Maxim would not come in shouting references to letters addressed in a certain way.
Perhaps she took some comfort from what he said, for her voice when she spoke was much gentler. She said, “I’m not exaggerating, John. You and I don’t feel alike on these things. No, not really. That’s natural. You live for yourself, you don’t know how real certain things can be to other people. It’s simply that your mind is turned in a different direction. I never realized it, I suppose. But the way you love the past, for instance—” Her voice was now infinitely kind, so kind that it destroyed him. “I do think you care more about the past than you do about the future, John. And that’s your right, it’s understandable, I do understand it.” She frowned with her concentration of friendly understanding. “But it makes you tolerant of things I can’t be tolerant of. I don’t think about them, I just feel them. I just feel them here.” And she laid her hand upon herself and upon the developing child that was her guarantee.
So full a statement seemed to have discharged her feelings wholly, for she broke off and said, �
�I’m sorry I made a fuss.” She turned to Arthur. “It was foolish of me, dear. And I won’t make a scene when they come. If we possibly can, we’ll get Kermit to take him away. Or maybe we can say that we’re just going off on a little visit ourselves. We’ll work it out somehow.”
She had closed the subject. There was nothing more to be said. Not that Laskell could have said anything. He did not dare speak for the destruction that was going on within him. It was a soft destruction, almost voluptuous.
Duck came out and said, “Mr. Croom, come in and look at this for a minute.” Arthur went and Laskell was left alone with Nancy. She was sitting in a chair and he was sitting on the grass facing her, in a quite ordinary summer attitude, his knees drawn up and his hands clasped around them. It was an absurdly incongruous position for what was going on inside him.
As Laskell looked back on that moment, he was appalled to think what might have followed if he had said nothing. It was not merely that his friendship with Nancy would have ended, and thus his friendship with Arthur. More than that: his friendship to himself, such as it was, would have ended too; he himself would have ended. Nancy’s gentle definition of him was at work, making a deep voluptuous emptiness in him. It frightened him, but it also drew him. Something within him was cooperating with Nancy’s definition to dismiss him from the world of men. If self-preservation is a virtue, he deserved from himself more credit than he knew in doing what he now did.
He said, “You did receive those letters for Maxim, didn’t you? Arthur refused, but you said yes. Isn’t that so?”
His voice was strange and dead. His only conscious impulse when he spoke was to assert a dominance which should out-top Nancy’s cool, kind, killing knowledge of him, to meet knowledge with knowledge. At the moment when, as it were, his manhood hung in the balance, he reached for the crudest impulse he had. But suddenly her two hands went to her cheeks, which were white, and she looked at him with scared eyes. He was reminded of what he had forgotten, that she was a woman and one for whom he had love and that she was in guilt and trouble.
The Middle of the Journey Page 24