The Middle of the Journey

by Lionel Trilling

It was very hard to believe that only a few days ago there had been passion between them. Nothing in their temperaments, nothing in their faces, existed to show that they were matched. Perhaps they could not have spent an evening happily together—Laskell, who in his illness had been able to project a long-continuing relationship with Paine, had never projected anything for his relationship with Emily. She sat there with her face made intelligent by grief, which, because it subordinates all facts to one fact, is so like an act of intelligence that it gives to the face of sorrowing people, for a short time, the look of wisdom. Laskell could not say that she had made him happy. Indeed, wondering what he would have said in farewell if the half-sister had not been present to prevent his saying anything, he had to ask himself what the word “happy” meant. He thought that perhaps he should speak of the dead Susan—that subject could not be forbidden. But this he was not able to do. As he called the child to mind, she ceased to be the Susan Caldwell her mother knew—she became, poor thing, the abstraction of her own grace and of her own desire to have things as right as possible. But Emily had known Susan in all a child’s troublesomeness and cross-grained tempers, not as an idea, however lovely a one. Before she had taken the lumps out of the handful of earth she had strewn on Susan’s coffin, she had taken the lumps out of Susan’s cereal and mashed potatoes.

  So he did not speak of the child. He only said, “Good-by,” and then added, because something had to be added, “If I can help in any way, please—” He heard a rustling as the half-sister moved remonstratively in her chair. He remembered Mrs. Bradley’s vexation. Mrs. Bradley, although she had not yet made any attempt to remove the cause of her annoyance, and would not make the attempt, was seeing to it that she would not have occasion to be vexed again.

  “Thank you, I will,” Emily said, not wholly mechanically. “But there’s nothing, really.” And she smiled to him, with difficulty, but sweetly.

  He ventured, half-sister or not, to look at her face. But no, there was no connection between them. There was only the empty air between them. He hoped that at least there was as much purity in the airy emptiness as there seemed to be.

  But this was not, after all, the last time that he saw her. That was his great good luck.

  Kermit planned to leave the next day and it hastened Laskell’s thought of departure when Kermit offered to drive him to Westport and to put him up for the night. Laskell accepted the suggestion and told Arthur. He was sitting in the trailer when suddenly Nancy appeared. Arthur had told her their plans. She had come over to try to persuade them not to leave so soon. “When things happen, one wants one’s friends about,” was the way she put it, shyly. Maxim was there too, with Laskell and Kermit, and it was unmistakable to Laskell that Nancy’s glance as she made her request included him. They all agreed, of course, to stay. The child’s death had hit Nancy very hard indeed. She had preferred not to say “died” and she had jibbed at the idea of death, but when it came to the actuality, she was taking its full force. That the person who had died was a child made the matter worse for Nancy. “Such a little thing,” she would say. “Such a little thing,” although Susan, for her age, had not been little, but rather tall. And Nancy had more to deal with than the fact of Susan’s death. The Folgers had in effect told her that this was not her place, that another outlander, Miss Walker, one with more power than poor Nancy had was much more at home here than she. Worst of all, however, as Laskell could guess, was the difficulty of having to cope with what Duck Caldwell had done. Laskell would catch her looking both at him and at Maxim in a curious and distracted way, and he knew it was because she remembered that the two of them had spoken against Duck when she herself had valued him so highly.

  The next day the weather turned wet and cold. The Crooms spent most of their time about the fireplace, the one that drew so well because of Duck’s skill. Simpson and Maxim sat with the Crooms most of the day, for the trailer made close quarters. Laskell came and went, was in and out of the house according as he needed company or could not endure it.

  It had at last broken in on Kermit that Maxim was really religious. The loud voice in which Maxim had said the Lord’s Prayer the first time and his kneeling to say it the second time had been conclusive. Kermit put his discovery before Maxim. He presented it cheerfully, but Maxim said coldly, “I have been trying to tell you, Simpson, what it is that I really believe. But you have refused to understand me.”

  Kermit shook his head amiably, as if to remark what strange and interesting manifestations of the human spirit could exist in a democracy. Arthur could not take it that easily. “My God!” he said. Then he stopped, not exactly in embarrassment but because the interjection in the context had suddenly turned out to mean something different from what he had intended. He went on, “Have you lost your nerve to that extent?”

  “It may be that I have lost my nerve,” Maxim said. He had the quiet of a man who, though under attack, knows that he has won the advantage for the first time—he has at last made his opponents take him seriously. “But nerve, you know, is not really enough to live on. It is not really anything to live on at all.”

  “I don’t know what you mean when you say a thing like that,” Arthur said. “Why isn’t nerve a thing to live on?”

  “Because life is not an adventure,” Maxim said. “If you say to me that I have lost my courage, I’ll tell you that you are wrong. But at least I know that we are being serious with each other. But when you tell me that I have lost my nerve—then I say, yes, you may be right, but it doesn’t interest me.”

  “But Giff”—Arthur fluctuated these days between Maxim’s last name and his first—“you can’t possibly believe all that business.”

  “What business?” Maxim spoke the word “business” as if it were the habit of theologians everywhere to employ it in their most learned discussions. “Now, Reverend Father, as to this business of transubstantiation,” they might say to each other. If Arthur wanted to talk about religion, Maxim was quite willing to talk about it in any language that suited Arthur.

  “You know what business.”

  “You mean, in general, the unseen. It is not so very hard. I am practiced in believing doctrine that is full of mysteries. I have, you know, been dealing with free-will and predestination and foreknowledge, in original sin and redemption, all under different names and with a different outcome for a good many years now.”

  Arthur looked puzzled, then he impatiently understood. “It’s not the same thing at all,” he said rather harshly.

  Maxim raised his eyebrows in question. “It’s not so different as you think. We all have a passion for faith in the unseen. It is really the only thing we have faith in. You, for example, have a profound faith in what our clerical friend, Mr. Gurney, calls the Research Magnificent, the Great Experiment. You believed me when I brought you good news of it. Now that I bring you bad news of it, you not only will not listen to me, but you fear me and call me names. I am sure that you will say that I have no proof. But I had no proof before. You believe as you want to believe.”

  “I believe where reason and the facts permit belief.”

  Arthur’s replies were of this kind, defensive but so fiercely said that they served as attack. Laskell had never heard Arthur so stubborn and fierce.

  It was Maxim’s strategy to draw Arthur on to attack an established position. Maxim was good in defense—it would not take many months for him to be very good indeed. But his faith was still somewhat new. He had no doubt begun to formulate his religious beliefs at the same time that he was doing his “special and secret” work. He could not have given very much time to the refining of his homiletics, and he now had to work hard on the spot. But he did it very well. His line of defense—not, of course, a new one—was based on the assumptive nature of all human life, on the awareness of complexity and mystery in the world. It referred to the conceptualism of modern science—not the science of the nineteenth century but contemporary science—and claimed for the moral and spiritual life the sam
e rights of concept that were granted to science.

  Maxim handled his argument skillfully. In the main it was Arthur who answered him. Nancy sat silent, Kermit said very little. Arthur did not say much but he said it stubbornly and with anger. He chiefly said, “I don’t see that,” or “It seems to me that that kind of talk means nothing at all.”

  Suddenly Laskell got up and said, “I’ll see you all later.” He took his raincoat and left before they had a chance to protest. It was late in the afternoon and the heavy, drizzling sky brought twilight in early.

  It was not that the subject of their conversation had disturbed him. It was a subject proper to all men, especially when the heart was sore and grieving, as his now was. But he was utterly weary of his friends. His mind drooped under its knowledge of them. He saw them in their wills—Nancy’s fierce and Arthur’s stubborn, both perhaps temporarily checked and baffled but soon again to be released, and Maxim’s subtle and masked in talk of mysteries and the charity of these mysteries. It was not their wills that wearied him but the necessity they shared to make their wills appear harmless.

  In the midst of his disenchantment with his friends, Laskell knew that he would not feel as he did were he not disenchanted with himself. He walked home—that is, to his room at the Folgers’—in the chilly drizzle, through the mud of the road. There was a lamp lighted in the Caldwell house, the afternoon was as gray as that. He hurried by. The light, and the thought of what went on around that light, in Emily’s heart, between Emily and Mrs. Bradley, made him wholly desolate. There was nothing he could do for Emily—he did not love her enough to dare to do anything.

  In his room he lit both lamps and tried to read. But he was cold and restless. He got up for a package of cigarettes from his dresser and his eye fell on Emily’s bowl. He took it up to look at it once more, for it could be thought of as the sad monument of his summer.

  Especially in the light of the lamps, it seemed, with its heavy colors, to be very dark in its conception. He did not know what part of Emily Caldwell had given it this character, for, although it synopsized in some uncomprehending way so much of the recent art of the Western world, it must also have some particularity of the individual who had made it. In his knowledge of Emily, Laskell had never seen in her anything that he could think of as the source of this unhappy design in which, although the intention had been to show the angles and curves moving at their freest, there was something claustral and desperate. There were, it seemed, depths below the bright humanistic surface that he did not know about, except as the bowl now suggested them. He had seen Emily in many aspects—for an instant as Demeter in the pride and grace of her maternity, then as the partisan of an outworn rebellion, as the ambitious mother scheming for middle-class advantages for her daughter, and as a tender and responsive woman on the river bank. Now, looking at the bowl she had painted, he saw her deep awareness of nullity, her knowledge of darkness. He no longer saw the ineptness of the design, but only what it suddenly and darkly spoke of.

  But then as he looked at the bowl, the awkwardness of the design appeared to him again, and he thought of the pride that Emily had taken in her work. It had led her to raise—actually to double—the price she had put upon the bowl. Laskell did not love her. But he loved her natural foolish pride which had led her to place this large valuation on the thing she had created and which he knew was connected with the warm generosity of their meeting together on the river. As he thought of that meeting, he remembered the spiritedness with which she had asked him whether he was supposed to hate death, the authority with which she had spoken. He knew, now that he thought he understood the meaning of the abstract design of the bowl, at what cost that spiritedness had been won and on what her authority was grounded. He did not love her, not in any sense of that word as it is used between men and women. He felt no community of passion with her. But in that moment, in all the empty world, she was the one person who existed for him in love. And he remembered with despair the words and habits that had separated them, the accusations that had been made by his divided mind and the severe judgments of his demanding and critical heart.

  It rained again the next day. Once more they all sat around the Crooms’ fire. There was not much to talk about today and they were bored. The cigarette smoke and the wood smoke made their eyes smart and their heads ache. Micky was cross from being kept indoors and also, no doubt, because he sensed some trouble in his mother’s mind. All their nerves were strained. But late in the afternoon there was a break in the weather. The rain stopped and then, almost suddenly, the sun began to shine. They tumbled out of the house like Laplanders seeing the first light of the year. Nancy put rubbers on Micky and turned him loose on the lawn. The others stood about, breathing deeply and stretching their legs.

  Had it not been for what had happened they would not so quickly have heard and taken notice of the clink of her pails at a distance. But they did hear the pails clinking and they waited for her to appear, a little tensely, as if they felt some fear. And actually Laskell’s heart was pounding in his chest.

  “She shouldn’t have to go that extra distance to get her water,” said Nancy in a low voice. “There’s no reason why she shouldn’t get her water from us.” And she said with determination, “I’ll tell her.”

  Nancy started toward the road and so did Laskell. Arthur followed, and Kermit and Maxim followed him, so that they were all trooping rather absurdly over the lawn toward Emily Cadlwell. They stood waiting on the muddy road, and she came up to them.

  “Oh, thank you,” she said when Nancy made the suggestion about the water. “But you see, I’ve been used to getting it at the Korzinskis’ always. But thank you just the same.”

  “If there’s anything I can do—” Nancy said.

  “It’s kind. There’s nothing.” She looked down at her feet. “Only,” she said, “only you’ll not have any feeling about Duck working for you again, will you?” The question was addressed to the Crooms. “He’ll be back in a day or so.”

  “Back?” Nancy gasped. She should not have been surprised. She had heard the men agree that the coroner would not hold Duck, not for slapping his child in the face—for he had not killed his child if two reputable medical men from Hartford could testify, as of course they could, that the child had had a serious condition of the heart. Nancy had heard this but apparently she had not listened. All she knew was that Duck had killed Susan. And she said again, “Back?”

  “Why, yes,” said Emily, looking up sharply. “It was not a crime. Not even manslaughter. He didn’t mean it. He didn’t want to do it. He was a little under the influence of alcohol. And then Susan’s heart was weak—very. It was always a danger for her. Everything was dangerous. Two doctors told me. Duck didn’t know about it. They say he didn’t do anything that a father might not do. It wasn’t his fault. He was just—the—the—”

  “Just the agent of fate,” said Kermit to help her out, and then seemed surprised that he had said it.

  “Yes,” she said. “Just the agent.”

  Arthur said, “Don’t worry about Duck working for us. It will be all the same as it was.”

  “If it was anybody’s fault,” Emily said, “it was mine. I’m to blame—I didn’t tell him about her heart condition. I had no right to keep it to myself. If he had known, he would have been careful of her. It’s my fault.”

  She still had some of the first hysteria of grief, and it was threatening to break through, so she turned and walked on as fast as she could.

  “Emily,” Arthur called after her. “Don’t worry, Emily. It will be all right.”

  To Laskell it was unendurable that she should go. And when she was at the end of the stone wall that separated the Crooms’ property from the road, he ran after her. She must have heard him running through the mud, but she did not turn. But when he caught up with her, she stopped. Then she looked at him. “You’re crying,” she said simply.

  And it was true, although he had not known it until she told him.

/>   “Don’t,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “No, I won’t.”

  She put down her pails and took a handkerchief from her short sleeve and wiped his cheeks vigorously. She did it without any hesitation or sorrow. And he understood that she felt she had a right to do so because they had been lovers. He had the full conception of her spirit when he understood that she had no desire to blot out that incident on the river bank. Her grief did not destroy her moment of passion. She did not think, as many another woman might have thought, in the superstition of early grief, that her moment of passion had been paid for by the death of her child. She did not have to make believe that her relationship to Laskell, short as it was, had never existed. She scrubbed once more at his face and smiled to him wanly. “There!” she said.

  Then she said, “You have been very good.”

  He shook his head.

  “Yes,” she said. “To me you were very good. And to Susan. I’m happy she liked you so much—she was happy when she was with you. And I’m glad you paid for the funeral. You had a right to.” And then she said, but it took more courage, “And you were good to him. I know about how you ran after him. I know why you did it. He knows too. When I saw him in Hartford and told him about the heart, he said, ‘So that’s why he ran after me.’ You have been very good.”

  She leaned toward him, touched with the tips of her fingers one of the cheeks she had just scrubbed of tears and put her lips lightly to the other cheek. He closed his eyes against what she was doing. She picked up the pails and went on her way to the Korzinskis’, leaving him there on the road.

  He did not know why her word “good” struck him like an accusation, so that what with the force of that emotion and the force of what he felt from her touch and her kiss, he put his hands to his face as if in some distraction. His friends had seen the meeting and what Emily had done. Laskell knew they saw, but he did not care. When he returned to them—they had all gone into the house—they gave no sign that they had seen anything.