“Maybe you love the child’s mother, but you loved the child too. The man ran in guilt and you ran after him in rage. It wouldn’t be surprising that in the heat of the moment you wanted to kill him. So I supposed that the knife was yours. The blade was open.”
Having concluded his reasoning, Maxim made a gesture of opening his hands to show how natural it was that he should have come to it. The gesture had also the effect of suggesting that the conclusion was a logical and even a right one. Laskell did not answer. He picked up the knife and opened the largest blade.
It was then that he saw how homely and harmless a thing it was, how dull and stained. It had a cheap white plastic handle. He turned it over and saw that on the other side of the handle was a picture of a naked woman. She lay at full length along the handle of the knife, long-legged, wide-hipped, notable for the size and symmetry of her breasts. Laskell could press his thumb against the dull edge of the large blade without making anything more than a ridge in his flesh. It looked as anonymously touching as a broken stone knife dug out of some ancient kitchen-midden. He held out his hand with the knife in it so that Maxim could see the picture of the naked woman. Maxim had certainly not seen it or he would not have supposed the knife was Laskell’s. Maxim looked at the picture and with a small movement of his glass signed that he had indeed been in error. Laskell closed the knife and put it away in his pocket.
“What are you going to do with it?” Maxim said.
“Do with it? I don’t know what I’ll do with it. Give it back to him.”
Maxim glanced keenly at Laskell as if to read some unexpressed motive in what Laskell had said. He said, “If you didn’t run after Caldwell in rage, why did you run after him? To capture him for the law, like a good citizen?”
It was hard to tell whether or not there was irony in Maxim’s voice. Laskell said, “No.”
“Then why did you run after him? And what did you want to say to him after they started to take him away?”
Maxim was asking questions as if he still had the right to do so because of his commitment to the great cause of the future. He had no commitment and no right. Yet he did not seem to be asking questions idly. There was something he really wanted to find out. There was something he needed to know for some purpose of his own, though Laskell was too weary even to try to guess what that purpose was. With each moment now the fatigue grew greater.
Laskell got up and poured himself another drink of whisky. “I’d just as soon not talk about the whole business,” he said. He felt that if the weariness grew at this rate he would be unable to say another word.
“All right, John,” Maxim said readily. “But let me ask you this—you say you did not run after him in a rage, but are you going to give him back the knife now? I mean, are you going to do it knowing how much worse it will be for him if it is shown in court that he pulled a knife on you?”
Laskell examined Maxim’s face. It seemed impossible that even a Maxim fallen from glory could imagine the possibility of such an intention. He let his contempt come into his face as he said, “What’s the matter with you, Maxim?”
Maxim paid no attention to the contempt. He said very mildly, “It’s just because you said you were going to give him the knife. It obviously could only get him into worse trouble.”
“I meant when they let him go—that’s when I would give it to him.”
“Do you expect to be in these parts when they let him go? That will be a long time from now. It’s not murder, but he’ll get quite a few years for manslaughter.”
“No. They’ll let him go,” said Laskell. “The child had a weak heart. He didn’t know that. But that’s why the slaps killed her. They’ll have to find it an accident. I doubt if it will get beyond the coroner.”
“Those were no slaps,” Maxim said. “Those were blows. I was sitting right there. But they’ll let him go if what you say is so.” And then he added craftily, “He didn’t know about the heart?—but you did?”
“Yes,” Laskell said. He knew he was admitting his relation to Emily. He nevertheless said it.
“That’s why you ran after him? To tell him?”
“All right, Maxim. All right. You win.” Laskell sat down with his drink.
It was almost amusing how skillfully Maxim had drawn the web around him to trap the information he wanted. A beautiful job—first the assumption that the knife was Laskell’s, then the suggestion that Laskell intended to add to Duck’s trouble by turning up with it. He was still quite the inquisitor, just as good as he had ever been.
But why should he be exercising his inquisitorial skill now? Was it simply because it was his nature to use it? No, that was not it. Maxim was asking, “Why did you care, John?” And dimly Laskell perceived that Maxim was not questioning him gratuitously, that he was after something. Shaking his head as if physically to clear his brain, he addressed himself to the question.
“Care? You mean, why did I care that he shouldn’t run away, that he shouldn’t try to do something foolish?” Maxim nodded to this formulation of the question. Laskell made no attempt to answer it at once. Why indeed did he care? Laskell realized he did not know the answer. He still had to work it out for himself.
He had not given the matter a thought—he had simply seen Duck start to run and had known that Duck was running because he thought he had killed the child. He had chased after him to correct the error. But why had his mind been so quick to perceive the error and why had he felt the need to correct it, a need so immediate that it had made him forget the deep visceral hatred he felt for Duck? He was not able to come to a conclusion. He was not able really to think about it, but only to “consider” it.
Even after he had been silent a while Laskell had nothing more to say than, “He’s not responsible for the child’s death, you see.”
He said it simply, as if Maxim were a very simple person.
Maxim just sat and waited, not speaking. Laskell frowned. In some vague way he resented Maxim’s pressure on him to discover his motives. Yet he would himself like to know what lay behind his “automatic” response of running after Duck. He said, “Maybe I’m just as responsible as he is.”
He was surprised by the sudden gleam that lighted Maxim’s eyes. Maxim at once veiled that hawklike eagerness and said softly, almost insinuatingly, “You mean—because we are all members one of the other?”
“No, that isn’t what I mean. Whose language is that?” said Laskell sharply.
“Isn’t it St. Paul’s?” said Maxim.
“St. Paul’s,” Laskell repeated after him. “Yes, I suppose it is St. Paul’s. No, that isn’t at all what I meant. I meant that if I hadn’t tried to make the child do things the right way, to do them my way, in reciting that poem, she wouldn’t have fumbled and she wouldn’t have forgotten the next lines. Then he wouldn’t have hit her. Then she wouldn’t have died.” He did not add, “It was I who killed her, not Duck,” but the words did not need to be spoken. “The point is,” Laskell made his voice as neutral and reasonable as possible, “Susan knew that poem perfectly well the first time she said it to me, a couple of weeks ago. But I was so sensitive, so devoted to good taste that I had to start correcting the way she did it. I had sense enough to check my critical impulses, but not until I had done my damage. You were right when you said I loved the child—I guess you were right, it never occurred to me in just that way before—and I suppose that’s why I didn’t want her to make a fool of herself with that absurd way of reciting. I suppose, since I loved her, I didn’t want her to make a fool of me. So I interfered. I had sense enough to stop, but I went far enough. Quite far enough, it turns out.”
Maxim did not reply for a moment. Then he said, “That’s what you meant by saying you were responsible too?”
“Yes.”
“Is that all you meant?”
“Yes.”
But since Maxim pressed the question, Laskell thought that he might have meant also that if he and Susan had not been so very fond of each other, i
f she had not come to him to “hear” her recitation, and no doubt bragged a little bit about it at home, Duck would not have been jealous—for perhaps jealousy in part accounted for the immediacy of his rage. But he did not say that to Maxim.
Maxim seemed to brood on Laskell’s answer as if it frustrated him but need not frustrate him forever. Laskell, for his part, was brooding too. He was thinking about responsibility.
He thought about Emily’s part of responsibility in teaching the child to recite in that absurd “expressive” way, making sure that the child would make the most of her brief moment of public appearance, and he was thinking of responsibility in general and of blame in general. He thought of the infatuation of Nancy and Arthur for Duck that had led them to lend Duck the car the day of his arrival. Had they not done that, perhaps he would not have developed his strange hatred of Duck, and then perhaps the whole sad tension with the Crooms would not have developed. And then perhaps he would never have seen Emily in the light of that odd partisanship he had felt, nor given his warmth of feeling to Emily’s little daughter, nor moved on to feel whatever it was that he did feel for Emily herself. And if he had not thus strengthened his opposition to Nancy, he perhaps would never have said to Kermit Simpson that he believed Maxim was right in what he had said about the Party and thus changed the whole nature and character of his thought with which he had been so comfortable for some years now.
There was no logic in it, or perhaps there was too much logic in it. It went back, for that matter, beyond Duck—there was his illness, and Paine and Miss Debry. It probably went back even farther than that. Maybe it went back to Elizabeth’s death, and even beyond Elizabeth’s death—to his comfortable willingness not to be married to her, not to have that responsibility, which, in turn, meant that when she died there had been no way for him to realize and to express his grief, for he had not realized the relation with her, so that only Maxim had been available to him as anything like a comforter, and Maxim’s company the only sign of his grief, with the result that Maxim had established his ground for that future “claim.” He gave it up, it was getting too involved. When something involved so many things so tenuously, then it was ridiculous to think about it as responsibility. One could no longer think about it at all, one could only feel.
Maxim, after he had let Laskell sit a while, said, “Then you don’t hate him?”
“Hate him? I’m sure I don’t know, Maxim.” Laskell’s tone was dry. “I don’t exactly love him.”
“But you do forgive him?” Maxim spoke insinuatingly, as if he were trying to win some least concession from Laskell.
Laskell stared at him. “Forgive him? Who am I to forgive? What am I, God?”
“Yes, in a way.” Maxim almost crooned. “In the way that if we are all members of one another, then each of us is in some part God.”
“For Christ’s sake, Maxim!”
Laskell rose abruptly. He did so in an impulse to get away from whatever it was that Maxim was up to. He might at that moment have walked out of the trailer. But the passion with which he had risen sufficiently discharged his irritation and disgust and he did no more than go to the ice-bucket and put some ice into his whisky. He wanted to know what Maxim was up to. He decided to ask. He said, “Giff, you’re trying to say something. What is it? What are you trying to tell me? I’m tired as hell, but get it off your chest. What are you up to?”
And then, as soon as he had put the question as explicitly as that, he had the beginning of an understanding of what Maxim was up to. At any rate, Maxim seemed to suppose that Laskell knew, for he said, “What I am trying to tell you, John, you know perfectly well. What I want you can’t give me.”
And Laskell did know now. He knew why it was that Maxim had assumed that the open knife was his. Maxim had not, after all, pretended to that assumption. He had really made it. He had made it because he wanted to believe that Laskell had tried to kill Duck Caldwell. And he wanted to believe that for the same reason that his face had lighted up with that hawklike eagerness when Laskell had said that he was responsible for Susan’s death quite as much as Duck had been. He wanted Laskell to have been guilty of the intention of killing Duck or responsible for killing Susan because he wanted company in his own guilt. Maxim had killed someone—Laskell knew it or very nearly knew it. “What I want you can’t give me,” Maxim had said. What Laskell couldn’t give him was company in guilt.
He had refused to admit that he had tried to kill Duck. The knife was not his. He had run after Duck not to kill him but to tell him that he had not murdered his child, only hastened her death. And when Laskell spoke of his own responsibility for Susan’s death, Maxim had leaped at that, thinking that Laskell had meant that because we are all members one of the other, the whole human race was implicated in the guilt of every member. That would have given Maxim plenty of company. But Laskell had not meant that—he had meant only that if he had not interfered with Susan’s way of reciting, the whole tragic business would not have taken place. This was not the kind of thing Maxim was after. It did not give him the company he wanted.
But perhaps what he wanted and what Laskell could not give him was not company but forgiveness. Was that why Maxim had asked so eagerly, “Then you forgive him?”
Laskell knew that Maxim was guilty of the death of someone, and if he did not know it fully at first, he knew it fully enough when, the next moment, Maxim held out both his great bearlike hands, the palms up. The fingers were crisped a little and held far apart from each other as if they must not touch each other, just as each hand must not touch the other or any part of Maxim. He did not look at his hands, only held them out as if they were filthy and dripping. He looked at Laskell as he said, “It won’t wash off, I find. Not all the perfumes of Arabia, not all the oil of Persia can sweeten this little hand.”
The facetiousness of his calling his hand little was desperate. Maxim’s face was breaking up. First there was a look on it of final weariness, masklike weariness, and then the mask began to twitch. The eyes shifted from side to side, looking for a way out. It was terrible to see.
It was unbearable, this on top of all that had happened. It made all that had gone before suddenly present to Laskell as it had not yet been. The impulse to run, to put as much distance as possible between himself and this new horror, was all but irresistible, but Laskell still had the clarity and control to fight it down. For the second time in a half-hour he was face to face with a man who had killed. He was filled with revulsion. Yet he was not wholly filled with it, for there seemed to be room for pity too. Perhaps pity was not quite the word for what he felt—it was a sterner emotion than that. Certainly the revulsion was not so great as when, in his apartment, he at last had understood that Maxim had broken with the Party. He felt that he must say something to Maxim.
The only thing he could think of to say was, “Was it Theron Walker?” His purpose in saying that was to bring the dark, unknown business into connection with the known.
Maxim shook his head mutely but irritably. When he was able to speak, he said, “No.” Then he said, “Of course not. I told you how Theron died. He stepped on a nail.”
His voice was aggrieved. It was as though he were surprised and hurt that anyone should not believe what he said, or should suppose that he could ever, in any way, distort or qualify truth.
He said, “Can you imagine guilt only if you can name the person and know what color his eyes were? If I could give you the names and circumstances, would that make it any more immediate to your imagination? My hands are bloody because of what I was, because of what I consented to, because of my associations.”
Laskell said, “You held your hands out that way simply because you were a member of the Party? Is that what you mean?”
“That is what I mean.”
“That’s all you mean?”
“Yes—at the moment that is all I mean.”
“At the moment? And what will you mean the next moment?”
Maxim paid no attention to
the hostility in Laskell’s voice. He said, “At the next moment I may mean something more. Not something else, but something more, in addition. At the moment I mean because I was a member of the Party.”
Laskell was very angry. “And that is your guilt? You hold out bloodstained hands only because you were a member of the Party? Is that why you are so concerned with forgiveness and why you talk so cozily about our being members each of the other? You mean members each of the others’ guilt. When you yourself were a member of the Party you tried to involve us all in your virtue. Now you try to implicate the whole world in your guilt. And your guilt turns out to be nothing more than membership in the Party! You have a very fancy kind of mind, Maxim.”
“If we speak of minds,” said Maxim, “you seem to have changed yours since last night. Our friend Kermit told me that he went after you last night and asked you if you believed the things I said. He reported back to me that you had said you did believe them. I think, by the way, I know the reason why you believed them last night even if you had not believed them before.”
This last remark Laskell ignored. He said slowly and firmly, trying to organize his mind against its weariness, “I believe what you say. But I don’t like what you’re trying to do. If you don’t know their names, if you don’t know the color of their eyes, then you’re talking about some metaphysical kind of guilt that I have no interest in. I know the kind of religious manipulation that undertakes to make the whole of the human race guilty for what any member of it does, or a whole society responsible for what any one of its members does. It’s a very attractive notion in some ways, but I don’t care for it any more than I care for the idea that the whole human race is innocent, or would be if the social system were better, which is the line of your former party. I don’t know what purpose of your mind is served by your feeling of guilt, but I do know that you are trying to implicate the whole world. You have been trying to implicate me since we came back here. You brought me here to implicate me. Well, I will not be implicated, Maxim—I don’t share your guilt.”
The Middle of the Journey Page 34