Yet this deathblow, as he felt it, to the pretensions of the Macdermott faction did not quite dispose of the anger evoked by the collision with Joe. He went to bed in a bad humor, having quarreled with his wife about the stove, and was awakened very early by the sound of shots outside. To get back to sleep was impossible. In the city, he would have dressed, gone out tieless onto the street, bought coffee and a paper and felt himself king of the morning, the news, and the sleeping Village. But here he could only toss and wait for the communal breakfast, which was to be served in the central building, at an hour he was powerless to advance. When he came out at last onto the lawn, wearing new work clothes which scratched him and cumbered the freedom of his gait, he found a small commotion. Off to one side in the clearing, Joe was doing target practice at an improvised rifle-range he had created by fixing some tin cans to locust-trees. The young veteran and the news editors had sauntered off to join him; others remained to watch, for the news had already got around that the oil stove was flooded and breakfast would be delayed. A good thirty, however, were gathered in the kitchen, where the cook of the day was sobbing, having burned off her bangs and eyebrows when she put a torch to the stove. She was laughing and crying at the same time, for while she prized her appearance (it was she who had brought the elaborate wardrobe), she had, so it happened, been Joe’s sponsor, together with her husband, and, recognizing her protégé’s hand in what had just befallen her, she was trying to treat the matter as lightly as possible.
“What happened, Katy?” Taub inquired with real solicitude; an accident to another moved him to identification. “Him?” he conjectured softly, darting a serpentine glance in the direction of the clearing, and nodding his head profoundly as he felt his suspicion confirmed. “Joe?” she answered vaguely. “I suppose. He was trying to get his breakfast without asking anybody anything. I ought to have warned him not to touch the stove.” Katy Norell was aware that this forgivingness sat well on her, in lieu at least of eyebrows and hair, and she continued to repeat the explanation of just how it had happened to everyone who entered the room, until what had begun as sincere extenuation became, by asseveration, a kind of unpleasant accusal, since the latecomers would never have connected Joe with the accident if Katy had not told them exactly how he came to do it. Joe’s wife, Eva, in fact, tapping forward from the doorway on her small high heels, flung her a bitter look and absorbed herself very pointedly in a study of the stove’s mechanism, as if to suggest that the conviction rested on dubious testimony, and that this silent iron witness would tell a different story if it could. Young Preston Norell, observing this, put a cautionary finger on his wife’s bare elbow and nodded with his eyes toward Eva. Katy broke off in confusion. “Did my husband do that?” Eva demanded, facing her now directly, with a tone of impeachment. Katy blushed and hesitated. Everyone had turned toward her; there was an expectant silence in the kitchen as the colonists waited to see how this first crisis would be met. It was not a friendly atmosphere but one of suspended commitment. “Watch this!” said Taub’s eyes prophetically to Susan; at the door, someone hushed a member who demanded to know what was happening. The interest, for the spectators, centered on Katy’s character. With anyone else, it would have been a simple matter to say No or Yes and make an end of it, but the struggle she was having to pronounce a ready disclaimer was visible even through the soot on her expressive features. She did not dare to say Yes, though this was what nature urged on her, and she feared that a strong No would imply a previous lie. “It was only an accident,” she said finally, in a feeble and unveracious voice. “Somebody was careless and left the oil turned up without lighting the stove.”
Preston Norell’s long fingers dropped from his wife’s arm, and he pushed his way out in disgust. For those words, only and somebody, he wished her in hell; he was sick and tired of a wife who could not bear to have people believe that she had flooded a stove which in fact she had not flooded. “Who cares!” he exclaimed aloud in a veritable frenzy of boredom. Katy’s vanity he did not object to; indeed, he found it entertaining, but the irresolute repetitiousness of her character, the perpetual see-saw between intention and execution, illustrated so banally in this incident, reminded him of his mother, a well-meaning woman whom he disliked. This produced in him the disagreeable sensation of having been born married, though in fact he had celebrated his second wedding anniversary only a few days before. A nomadic and restless temperament, he had felt a deep-going antipathy to Utopia and the suggestions of finality it conveyed: Katy had teased and persuaded—they must go and live for others, she insisted, in the same tone of pretty conviction with which she demonstrated the absolute necessity of a new dress or an apartment which his salary could not afford. As usual, he had allowed himself to be reconciled to a commitment which bound him more tightly—the freedom stressed in the manifesto seemed to him a very ethereal entity compared to the freedom of movement he renounced when they entered the gates. Now, the contretemps about the stove, the querulous morning mood of the colonists, the failure of breakfast to materialize, the lack of sportsmanship of his wife, combined to bring on an attack of the most violent claustrophobia—he struck off across the lawn, going he knew not where. His fury was out of all proportion to the cause that had provoked it; he had left his wallet in their cottage; he was dressed in shorts and sneakers; his job was gone and his apartment sublet to a war-worker: in an hour he might relent, but the need to be elsewhere was stronger than common sense. Someone called after him, but he paid no attention; the other colonists and the environs were included in his anger with Katy; he thought of Utopia simply as a place in which it would be impossible ever to escape from her, a multiplication of marriage or its projection into eternity.
She was following him out now; he could hear her footsteps running behind him; she caught him just beyond the lawn, her face distorted with tears, which he could envision with perfect distinctness while keeping his eyes averted. “Forgive me,” she cried. “Forgive me!” Plainly, she was not going to pretend, as she sometimes did, not to know how she had offended; the others were watching curiously, and he perceived, with a certain savage satisfaction, that she felt she must deflect him from whatever course he was planning, before their rupture was public. “Go in and get the breakfast,” he said sternly, shaking his arm free. “Pull yourself together. You disgust me.”
Her sobs instantly grew louder, and he threatened her with his eyes. Her condition awoke no pity in him; he had seen it too often before; at the same time, a certain politic instinct cautioned him not to drive her to a point where she could no longer control herself, for suddenly he was not sure how he wished this quarrel to end. Arrested in his trajectory he became conscious of the practical difficulties of leaving, and the humiliation she would suffer if he should do so moved him to compunction. Feeling nothing but distaste for her as she stood there before him, he nevertheless foresaw a state in which she would be pitiable, poor derelict thing, just as he remembered, without any particular interest, a moment when she had been lovable, only the night before. At bottom, he felt responsible for her, and it was the very strength of this feeling that made him detest her now. He remained silent therefore and waited for her sobs to cease, fixing her with a schoolmaster frown and tapping his foot impatiently. “Go back,” he commanded at length, when her breath began to come more easily. “If you will,” she stipulated childishly, but at the very suggestion of bargaining, all his hatred revived. “No,” he said, shaking his head rapidly several times, the blond hair gleaming in the sun. “Go.” “But you’ll come soon?” she persevered. He shrugged his shoulders in half-concession; he would promise nothing verbally.
Katy started to walk slowly across the lawn. Having secured from Preston what she interpreted correctly as a guaranty of return, she began to consider the quarrel in quite a different light, to ask herself, first what account she should give of it to the other colonists, and, secondly, what apologies and admissions she could wring from him later in the day. The phrase, “You d
isgust me,” kept surging up to her oesophagus like something she had been forced to swallow but could not assimilate; if it were not retracted, she felt it would literally kill her. At the same time, she was aware of the folly of reopening the discussion; her husband, rearoused, was only too likely to repeat it. That this phrase might embody an actual truth of feeling elicited from her consciousness only a vague and irrelevant wonder: is it possible, she asked herself in a tone of disinterested curiosity, that he does not love me? And though she was in the habit of cross-examining him tenderly on this point (“Do you love me?”—“Yes,” “Perhaps,” “What do you think?”), she found, to her surprise, that the possibility of a negative answer did not really exist for her. “Nonsense,” she said to herself, “he must love me,” and the notion that he perhaps did not simply annoyed her with him, like some idle, neurotic fancy or an over-conscientious scruple. A nicety of feeling which could withdraw him from her in spirit, while he remained physically on the premises, exasperated, even as a hypothesis, everything practical and quotidian in her tenacious and self-centered character. “I would not forgive him for that,” she declared to herself precisely, forgetting that the offense she postulated placed him by definition beyond the reach of her disapproval. But the instant this difficulty became clear to her, and the psychic absence of her beloved appeared suddenly as real, as real as the death she feared for him whenever he left her side, the armies of her love rushed after him, to surrender and bring him back captive. To surrender and treat afterwards was Katy’s habitual strategy in love, but now, shaken by her husband’s words, by the presence of onlookers, by the fright she had just given herself, she made a great resolution: to resign herself to his condemnation as to an immutable fact of nature, to take it, that is, seriously. For a single moment, in the severe northern light, darkened by the long shadows on the mountains, she had a perception of life as a black chain of consequence, in which nothing was lost, forgot, forgiven, redeemed, in which the past was permanent and the present slipping away from her (contrary to her instinctive opinion, which was that the past could be altered and actions, like words, “taken back”). She nearly cried out with pain as this unconscionable truth bit into her, and she recognized that the events of the past half-hour were, literally, irrecoverable. Such powerlessness, guilt, and desolation she had known only in nightmares, and from those she had, naturally, awakened, a fact which had misled her into considering evil a dream. Here for the first time, this impulsive and ingenuous nature found itself alone in a cold and unresponsive climate in which to announce, “I have ruined your morning,” did not constitute a refutation of the truth that indeed she had.
Accustomed to please, to smile, and court, and be petted, she felt the sensation of having given displeasure to forty-odd people as something so alien that she could hardly connect herself with it. That this had “had” to happen on the very first morning, when she, more than any of them, had wanted things to go well, she could only attribute to the malignant perversity of circumstance, and the pathos of the distance between her hopes and the reality received its final nuance when she presented herself in the kitchen, ready to take over, and found herself superseded, her menu set aside, and Eleanor Macdermott and Irene, the girl student, hurriedly making eggs and toast with silent, starched faces, as if in the presence of illness. With that instinctive tactlessness so common among educated people, they made no remark on her absence but simply became more busy. Lacking any fresh impetus she wandered vaguely over to where her big bowl of waffle batter stood untouched, like a pariah, precisely as she left it, except that the table around it had been very carefully wiped. “Would you like me to put it in the icebox?” Irene inquired, kindly, but with a manner decidedly mortuary, which suggested that this object revived associations too painful to be borne at the moment. Katy picked up the enamel spoon, which had been washed and aligned beside it, with that same hint of obsequies and ritual observance. “It’s too late?” she hazarded timidly, and the girl looked at her and sadly shrugged. She had studied Greek with Katy, and the humiliation of her teacher was painful for her to witness. “Much too late,” put in Mrs. Macdermott firmly. “They’re sitting down inside.” “Come,” said the girl gently, taking the spoon from her hand. “Come and eat.” Katy shook her head; her large brown eyes filled with tears. “I can’t face them,” she muttered.
“Nonsense,” said the girl maternally. “It was not your fault, you know,” and indeed such was the impression that prevailed among the majority of the colonists, who believed that Preston had stamped off blaming her, unfairly, for the accident and the late breakfast, while a dissenting minority on the other hand, could not be swayed from its verdict, which was that she had flooded the stove herself and had been caught by her husband trying to pass the buck to Joe. The code of honor articulate in the colony was by no means so theatrical as Preston’s: Macdougal Macdermott, for example, would have given a great hoot of laughter if anyone had proposed that his Eleanor “confess” to an oversight not her own—“For God’s sake, Preston, come out of it, man; you’re living in the Middle Ages!” The marital quarrels of the Norells, moreover, were too regular a feature of this society to excite any great curiosity, since everyone but the participants knew what the outcome would be. Only the young minister, with whom self-questioning was a vocational aptitude, could have wound his sinuous way through this labyrinth of error and triviality, and he had a priest’s tolerance—Katy’s capacity for regrets, together with her classical studies, had convinced him that she possessed a genuinely religious nature (ethics, in his view, had little in common with religion; every third Sabbath he produced a sensation in his rural flock by calling on the ladies of the altar guild and the Girls’ Friendly Society to abandon the specious assurance of salvation by works).
Katy, at any rate, allowed herself to be persuaded and made her appearance in the dining room, with a mournful step that suggested the whole chorus of The Suppliants. A picture of grief, silent, composed, unassuageable, had suddenly proposed itself to her imagination, and the sincerity of her inner feelings passed off at once into performance, as she bargained on the power of this pietà to move her husband to pity. But when her ranging eye at length discovered him sitting at the far end of a long table, wedged in between two other colonists, his high-colored face averted and obdurate, her heart collapsed within her. These moods of his (she recalled) could last as long as a day, and she felt really quite unequal to the tedious process of reconciliation which, in view of the fact that she was sorry, seemed to her highly unnecessary, like some legal routine or the difficulty of getting passports. Her interest in expiation quickly vanished in the face of its actuality. She could not be bothered with it—“It is simply too stupid,” she thought, experiencing on her own behalf that rational impatience with suffering that made her detest cruelty, injustice, poverty and wars. Men, to Katy’s mind, were born to love one another, and their refusal to do so she attributed to that same mulish obstinacy which her husband was demonstrating here in the fraternal hall. A strong will and a weak character had led her greatly to over-estimate the plasticity of the human material, and indeed that of matter itself: she recognized no obstacle to the general attainment of plenty and happiness, just as she saw no reason why she should not have a new Plato or a hat.
Preston now, no doubt about it, was taking advantage of the Utopian brotherhood to shut her out from himself. In this, she felt something unsportsmanly and even illegitimate: he knew very well that here, before all these people, she was helpless to secure his attention, and he must know also how she would suffer if he were to go out to the fields and leave her, without so much as a look. That the privacy to make a scene was something she would miss in Utopia was a contingency she had never anticipated, but now, surrounded by these watchers, she felt deprived of a basic right, the right to go over and expostulate with him, behave badly if necessary, until he responded to her grief. Preston, on his side, was discovering in the Utopian situation a privacy he had sought in vain durin
g two years of marriage. Though unaware of his wife’s exact location, he presumed that she had come into the room, but he had no intention of speaking to her until much later in the day. He felt protected by the others, in precisely the manner she assumed, and a cruel streak in his character was rejoiced by this turning of the tables, this illustration of poetic justice: little had she thought, when urging on him the manifold blessings of Utopia, that this would prove to be the chief. At the same time, however, he was conscious of a purer happiness, an extraordinary sense of solitude, as though he walked on a carpet of pine needles; the conversation around him acted as a kind of blanket which muffled the din of relationships; he sat alone among others, peacefully absorbed in his thoughts. As if on an ocean liner, a train, or a crowded foreign square, he recaptured his identity in a nothingness, an absence of the acting self. He was recalled to this world by the scraping of chairs in the dining room. The men were setting out for the fields.
Outside, on the porch, a vast elation seized him as he considered the empty morning and the loneliness of the work ahead. It had rained during the night, and the sky, still tossed with clouds, and the rumpled mountain landscape had an air of exhausted wildness, like a face on which the tears have just dried. This comparison, which came to him wittily, evoked the figure of his wife, who had strangely slipped from his mind, and, suddenly well-disposed and merry, he rushed into the kitchen to find her, whirled her twice around the room, and let go of her, to the discomfiture of Eleanor Macdermott, whose sense of permanent ill-feeling toward this femme savante had been somewhat mollified by the suspicion that she was about to become an object for charity. Katy, surprised and delighted, smiled her pleasure at once; she had never learned how to stay angry, which was perhaps a defect in her character. Yet the terms of the amnesty were too vague to set her mind altogether at rest, and forgetful of that resolve, which had seemed only an hour before essential to her moral survival, she detained him at the screen door. “Preston,” she ventured. He turned and waited politely, certain of what was coming but unwilling, even now, to please her, except on his own terms. “Preston!” she repeated. He raised his eyebrows in a look of inquiry. She did not know what to say. “Do I really disgust you?” she whispered, looking nervously behind her in the direction of Eleanor Macdermott. “Yes!” he cried emphatically, but with a shout of laughter; the conspiratorial manner of the question struck him as splendidly farcical—in his very tenderest moments, he looked upon Katy as a comedian. He now relented and patted her sharply on the buttocks. Katy returned to her work, in some peculiar fashion well pleased; though she had broken her resolution and come off with nothing to show for it, it seemed to her undeniable that she had acted for the best.
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