by Nigel Dennis
The old man was very pleased. So were Mrs. Morgan and Miss Wilberforce: the former was struck with admiration of her son’s courageous sweetness; for the same reason, the latter was obliged to lay down her fork. “Telephone, ma’am,” said Rosa; and Mrs. Morgan, dabbing her eyes with her napkin, hurried to the library, returning soon too affected not to explain.
“It was from Washington—that dear, hot-headed Mike Thalberg, swearing that we had only to give the word and he’d throw a picketline of his local around the State Department. At such times you find who are your real friends—where there are hearts as well as intellects … Annie, dear; you will note that Mike will send in a little item for the Divver issue?” “How long, Mrs. Morgan?” “I told him four hundred words was the very maximum.” “I hope we can squeeze it in, Mrs. Morgan.” “We shall squeeze it in, Annie, if the heavens fall or the printers walk out … Jimmy, dear, it’s the next issue of Forward we are talking about: it will be dedicated to Max and have a black border.”
“To Max?”
“Yes; a small memorial tribute to his life and work.”
He felt the strength go out of his body: above him loomed a black cloud in which truth and deceit tussled over Divver’s corpse and appealed to him for judgment. “And since we are on the subject,” continued his mother, “let me simply assure you that Lily has borne up wonderfully. As soon as I heard the news I went straight to the ’phone and begged her to put all worry about money and the future out of her mind.”
“Oh, that was kind, mother.”
“But she insisted that they … she … had some little savings in the bank, and that she had decided to go straight out and find a job, just as soon as she could find a maid for the little boy: a maid is the problem, of course, these days. I assured her that Forward would always have a place for her; but she said, very naturally and touchingly, that she would feel more at ease somewhere else—a place with no memories, she meant … Oh, dear, dear! … Mr. Waters is sure he knows of a place for her in some cultural-relations office of a friend of his: he, of course, is still his old, dear self; a little boring sometimes, but always kind and good … Well, eat up your pie now, and we’ll all have coffee on the sun-porch: I’m sure you want to stretch out in a comfortable chair.”
“Mother, I’m in perfect health.”
“Of course you are: I just thought you might be tired.”
Miss Wilberforce reached the sun-porch a few steps ahead of them, and murmuring casually, “Just clear things a little bit,” briskly swept some papers off the table—so briskly that he knew they were the rough elements of the Divver issue. He raised his hand to restrain her, faltered, dropped into a chair. “A little Scotch or Bourbon to go with your pipe?” his mother asked. “Scotch, mother? Pipe?” “Oh, I just thought you might have come home with a pipe; most young men do.” She looked at him proudly and said: “We shall have to take you to New York to buy you winter clothes.”
At this, he saw himself stripped of his last little fig-leaves of courage and honesty, and enshrouded for life in hundred per cent, virgin wool. “I think I ought to say straight out,” he said, “that I have no objection to discussing Max and my trip.”
“That is very courageous of you, dear; but give yourself a moment to breathe.”
“In fact, I would prefer to discuss it as soon as possible; it’s not a matter of courage.”
“Tell him about the bobcat in the rose-garden,” said his grandfather, putting an arm around Morgan’s shoulder.
“I know your advice will be most helpful to us,” said Mrs. Morgan; “we have no facts to go on; only the State Department report—and you can imagine what that is.”
“I imagine it’s based on what I told the consul.”
“So they would have us believe, dear; that you and poor Max were a pair of adolescent car-thieves.”
His grandfather retired to nap; Miss Wilberforce tactfully drifted away; he was alone with his mother.
He opened his mouth, to tell her what really had happened to Divver; but found himself saying: “I think I should tell you that I have stopped taking my medicine. It has made no difference; I did fine: only one, all the time; and that came when things were really abnormally difficult.”
“How wonderful, Jimmy! Then we’ll simply forget all about the pills.”
“I’m glad you agree, mother. And I want to apologize for behaving as I did. You were dead right about the blind stubbornness: it was all my fault that things ended the way they did.”
His mother was very moved; and after reflection, she replied: “I think we both have made many mistakes, Jimmy, in recent years. But as soon as you entered the house I saw that your experiences had changed you a great deal. And so I want to assure you that in your absence I, too, have learned one or two useful lessons and hope that we may start a quite different relationship. I have treated you like a child, but from now on I want you to behave absolutely as you wish; to go where you please, to make your own decisions. I hope you can believe that I mean this.”
“Yes, I can, mother, and I am most grateful. But frankly, the problem on my mind right now is Max.”
“Of course. You feel you have to set things right, as we all do.”
“But not in the way you suppose. No, the trouble is, I just don’t know how much to tell you. I was Max’s friend … at least, technically speaking I was. He confided in me. I saw what went on, and why things turned out as they did; what we both did; the causes of the whole mess … and what really happened to him.”
He began to stammer; his mother looked puzzled. But on seeing his intense expression, she looked first proud and then fondly amused. She pressed his hand and said archly: “You surely didn’t think your old mother expected you to behave like an ambassador to the Court of St. James’s?”
“No, mother, you have to believe that it was something more than that, a very serious matter.” But, again, instead of blurting out the real secret, he shifted his intention, and said: “Just to give you one example of what I did … If I hadn’t made a certain suggestion one day to Max, he would never have run into the people he did run into, and would still be alive. And we were not good friends at all, incidentally. We treated each other like spies. Now, of course, when it’s too late, I feel very fond of him and ashamed of myself.”
“At heart, Jimmy, I think that is the feeling we all have. We all feel somehow to blame; and the true reason is, I think, that not one of us, not a single one, ever imagined what stuff there was in Max. We all liked him; but only when it was too late did we recognize his stature.”
“You’ve got that all wrong too, mother; but I don’t know if I should tell you why … Well, for one thing, Max believed that all the people we know are ruthless and cruel; that they would torture anybody rather than not be thought serious and progressive.”
“He has my full support, Jimmy dear: I have thought that so often myself.”
“But he was sure that Forward would never have let him say so.”
“He was probably quite right. I think we are all sorry now that we followed the Communist lead so much. But that’s another thought which comes too late in the day.”
He began to feel that he was fighting tar-baby, and exclaimed desperately: “I’m trying to tell you that if you knew the whole story, there wouldn’t be a Divver issue.”
“Possibly not the same kind of issue, you mean?”
“No, no issue whatever. But I don’t know how much to say. Max is not here to defend himself; and anyway he wouldn’t have been. He was going to join the Polish army.”
“The dear man! But does not that alone rather contradict …?”
“Not one bit, when you know why. And then there are others still alive …”
“Lily and her little boy?”
“That’s right.”
They both fell silent. Then Mrs. Morgan said: “You will have to decide for yourself, Jimmy. But do you realize you have been back for no more than a couple of hours? Let us say no more at present. Y
ou think about it; and tomorrow, we’ll see.”
He felt her hand on his shoulder; it rested there in such a way that he looked up and saw in his mother’s face a novel expression—not that of a mother for her son but that of a sidesman for an elder of the church. Gravely, she sat down again with a newspaper, on whose back sheet he read the tempting words: “Is Europe now barred to you? Come to sunny Cuba! Recline on Montevideo’s spume-dreft sands! Taste of Pernambuco’s incomparable cuisine! Write for illustrated folder.”
“I think I shall go for a little walk,” he said. “And I should rather like to see Lily Divver. It might help me make up my mind.”
He saw his mother’s head nod behind the newspaper, and vaguely guessed that she was hiding a deep emotional crisis. “Annie will arrange it for you, if you feel you must,” she said.
*
That night, he found his old bedroom entirely different from what it had seemed to be when he had dreamed of it in Mell. It had also been cleaned and tidied in preparation for him; and his mother’s affectionate hand, guided by an infallibly-incorrect maternal instinct, had put on display all the things which he had once treasured and now despised; including beaming photographs of himself and friends, dressed for a costume-party (he was a bearded Sultan), a fishing-trip (he was waving an eel), a barbecue (he was handing a paper-plateful of charred frankfurters to the Chairman of the Association of Democratic Artists.)
He rushed all these relics out of sight: they were far more humiliating than the newly-painted steel bars in his window, which now seemed sensible and appropriate. He drew his silver cigarette-case out of his pocket and hurled it after the photographs, along with Three Great Plays by Christopher Marlowe. It was intolerable to remember that he had once used these horrible little objects as signposts to emancipation, and to know that now, when emancipation was a fact, it was as empty and unimportant as the cigarette-case. He mourned to think that once he had truly believed that having established his independence of a parent he would never need to establish it again, that what he had seen as a great end was nothing but a commonplace beginning. And a beginning to what? He had no idea. It was clear that opposition and independence had no necessary relation to one another, and that to choose to go through life in a state of automatic opposition was as cowardly and stupid as to choose automatically to acquiesce. It even occurred to him that most acts of assent required far more courage than most acts of protest, since courage was clearly a readiness to risk self-humiliation. On the other hand, he had seen Divver follow both these courses and yet remain the same man exactly—equally a coward regardless of which trumpet he happened to be blowing; a domestic slave in opposition, an unescaped slave in reaction abroad. And nonetheless, the more he thought of Divver the more grateful he felt to him: it was not every day that a man not only acted out a part which finally killed him but explained every nuance of the tragedy while he performed it as clearly and directly as if he were an expert tutor. In short, it was no pleasure to reflect that his own first act as an independent man was to choose whether to betray his dead teacher or help to write an epitaph which would betray the warm and lively teachings.
*
But when he got up for breakfast in the morning, the day was so sunny and the prospect from his window so beautiful that he felt almost ready to forget about such painful matters as choice, death, life, and independence. The gardener was riding the lawn on the motor-mower, leaving behind neat stripes of light and dark velvet; the sun-porch was full of sunlight and the smell of grass: like his mother and Miss Wilberforce, Morgan had put on old and comfortable country clothes. Beside his plate was a letter from a stranger, enclosing a large money order:—“This comes from an old man who is not known to you, but who hopes some day to have the privilege of shaking your courageous hand and personally bestowing a father’s thanks. When I consider the danger … my little daughter Harriet … your spontaneous generosity …”
A few months ago, his mother would have shown interest in a strange letter for her son; but this morning she gave it no attention whatever; and she and Annie went straight on with their planning of the day’s marketing and work, occasionally throwing him a smile which included him as a very old member of the club. “Lily says she will be delighted to see you between three and four tomorrow,” said his mother; “so if that’s convenient, we’ll have lunch a little earlier, and George can drive you to the train.” “Fine, mother,” he said to her; and to himself: And will I have to tell Lily too?.
On the front page of the morning paper was a large map, coloured for the most part a deep black, and spotted in the white areas with black rings and stubby arrows. It was more surprising than shocking to see that Tutin was in the black part, and still more surprising to see the small word Mell in the same black area, along with the names of neighbouring towns and villages which he had heard were full of interesting antiquities and was now sorry that he had not visited. For the first time, he felt the traveller’s pride in seeing a region with which he has had a personal acquaintance singled out by the Forces for special joy or destruction: he also noticed that the two women were conscious of his enlightened position in the matter; and he continued his study of the map, lighting a cigarette gravely but not without a certain self-respect. “Very bad, don’t you think?” said his mother, and he replied with a sigh: “Yes, I am afraid it is.”
But the more he looked at the map the harder it was to imagine the green dome and grey streets of Mell in an altered condition. He managed to put some monocled Nazi officers into the Archduke Suite, and a few men wearing steel helmets into Bread Street; but already the Archduke was growing into a fantasy of rosy carpets and distended cupids, and Bread Street a place where he had walked when he was a boy with an old friend, to stare at the tiara of the Maharanee of Purd. Out of respect for his feelings, his mother and her secretary had lowered their voices; and against the background of their murmuring he deliberately envisaged the dirty back-stairs of the Poland and the corpse—had anyone found it, did anyone else know? But there seemed to be no link between the secret that was haunting him so painfully and the plain, comfortable presence of the trees, the motor-mower, and the peaceful landscape in which corpses and steel helmets were impossible. Only talk about the Divver issue could naturally connect the two worlds; and at this moment his mother and Miss Wilberforce were discussing a leg of lamb. That both he and they should be capable of such detachment from Divver gave him a hard shock, and he suddenly thought: By God! When a man is dead, people ought to say the best damn things they can about him. He thought further: the man was like a father to me; he advised me to test myself by going to college: how good of him! Who am I to dig up his past and tell anyone the true story of his death, poor devil! … Nonetheless, of course, he was a terrible sap most of the time: I am sure I could never become that sort of person. Or could I?
He felt as bemused as if he had returned to his drugs: he made the sun-porch draughty with sighs. But next minute he was saying to himself: I guess it was really a pretty impressive experience, if you stand back and look at it objectively. He was struck by the thought that if he went to college he would carry with him a certain exotic kudos.
It made him jittery to have so many scrambled but irreconcilable thoughts; so he left the table and walked into town to find his friend Macky. It was a pleasant reunion: first they talked about fishing, then about the Polish situation, giving each subject the same gravity. As usual, Macky was the better informed in foreign affairs; but now he was obliged to qualify every comment by remarking, a little apologetically: “Of course, I’ve not actually been there.” Similarly, Morgan was obliged to defer to Macky regarding the domestic fishing situation.
Leaving Macky, he visited a few old haunts and met a dozen old friends. All their faces lit up when they saw him; all remarked how well he looked and wanted to discuss Europe with him. In the drugstore, he found himself in an unexpected relation with the girl who worked there: she was the town belle and made a point of being terse with yo
ung men; but today they sat together with their heads over a map of Poland which had come in the morning’s newspaper, and he described the prevailing landscape, the nature of the people, some of their peculiar customs, etc. Others at the counter listened with interest; and soon the flattery of their attentiveness, the respect they felt for one who had actually ridden through Persepolis only last week, made his tone of voice become somewhat drawling and urbane, his knitted brows grave and sophisticated: it was pleasant to think of browsing on their respect for the remainder of his life. He bowed good-bye and walked home for lunch feeling highly contented: only when he reached the drive-gate did he realize that he had still made no decision in the matter of telling the truth about Divver’s last days and death.
He stopped short, one hand on the gate-post; his suave elation dribbled away like the dregs of a stimulant, and a miserable gloominess took over. Not only did his past instantly look contemptible, but his future looked grim and hopeless, offering only a choice betwen the cosy corruptness of familiar flattery and the friendless, terror-haunted isolation which had marked his awful period of solitary confinement at the Hotel Poland. He saw himself wavering forever from one extreme to the other, lurching through life in an indefinite zig-zag, always in a state of despicable security or of terrified independence. His lack of the qualities he most respected, loyalty and courage, filled him with hatred of all human beings: like Divver, he wished they would all die painlessly, and so exonerate him from duties and decisions…. Of course, there were still ships afloat, to carry him away again to places where human beings were tolerable by virtue of being as unreal and undemanding as side-shows and old ruins …
He walked slowly into the house, wishing that he might avoid meeting anyone; but his mother met him in the hallway and informed him that Mr. Petty was joining them for lunch. “He’s off to live in New York in a few days: you will be surprised at the change in him. Something must have happened: he has stiffened up wonderfully in the past week; quite another person. Perhaps he has found a nicer sort of girl than little Peggy.”