Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  Meanwhile, sotto voce, in another part of the dining room, the realists were earnestly conferring. A tap on the shoulder and a significant nod of the eyes had directed each member of the faction to the small table at the rear, where Taub, spooning the dregs of his coffee, measured with a brief glance the loyalty of each newcomer and invited him to pull up a chair. Susan Hapgood was present, Harold Sidney (Will’s oldest and most cautious ally), John Aloysius Brown, Danny Furnas, Fearon Powers, and several others; the wives had not been included. Taub had already narrated his experience of the night before, and for the benefit of the late arrivals, Harold Sidney kept furnishing a rapid whispered summary of the outrage, like a respectful usher at the door of a meeting. Exclamations of indignation were general—“I think it’s just terrible,” Susan Hapgood cried, each time the story was told, her small-town capacity for being scandalized asserting itself somewhat ingenuously in this new sphere. “Don’t you, John, don’t you, Fearon?” she asked, turning her pretty birdlike brown head in sudden alarm and indecision to every member of the party. “Yes, yes indeed, quite,” they reassured her. The problem was, what was to be done. Taub, who had been waiting imperturbably for this question, like a headliner idling in the wings, proceeded to unfold his plan. Any board member, he pointed out, had the right to call an emergency council meeting, without stating his reason, if eight hours’ notice was given. Council members, therefore, would be notified immediately of a session to be held that night, in camera, at his cottage, to act against an unnamed person who had been guilty of asocial behavior. This procedure would give Joe’s friends neither time nor occasion to organize a counter-movement on his behalf; the atmosphere of mystery would demoralize any potential opposition, which would waste and scatter its energies trying to guess who was meant. “Bad conscience,” he explained stonily, regarding his confederates with a look almost of warning. “That’s how we get these moralists. Make each one think it’s him.” He gave a brief snort of pure laughter. “And don’t give them a chance to discuss it.” “Why not at five o’clock, then?” asked someone, counting on his fingers. The realist leader frowningly shook his head: conditions of secrecy were indispensable; happily, they could infer from Lockman’s hour of rising that he went to bed early. “What if he has insomnia?” put in Brown, with the air of a veritable Aquinas and laughing heartily at the same time to indicate the savor of the jest. He was a philosophy teacher who had been converted from Marxism to the absurd, an ungainly and aggrieved man full of insistencies, who imagined that his jokes were not understood. “I say, Will, what if he has insomnia?” he repeated, flapping a loose forefinger to command Taub’s attention. Taub shrugged impatiently; he did not greatly care for Brown, whom he considered too unstable to be of much use in practical affairs. “Insomnia gosomnia,” he remarked, dismissing the objection.

  “At ten o’clock at Will’s, then?” persisted Harold. He had feared and honored Taub too many years not to feel that a great importance attached to having the meeting take place in the chieftain’s living-room, in the shade, so to speak, of his numen. “The team always plays better in its home park, eh, Will?” he queried, nudging Taub and giggling. Taub acquiesced with a grin and, seeing his audience receptive, was moved to recall a time when control of a committee had been, as he put it, “stolen” from him by a fellow-member who on the pretext of economy had simply removed the offices to his own apartment. “That taught me a lesson,” declared he, with a reminiscent groan, and his male associates ruminatively nodded their large heads in concord, amplifying the thought. “What about the Macdermotts?” objected Susan, who felt slightly chilled and alienated by this elephantine strategy. “They will want to stay home with their children,” she explained. Taub and Sidney, thunderstruck, exchanged a consultative stare: Macdermott’s three children, they were agreeing, constituted a real political asset; how many meetings, on their account, could not be transferred to Taub’s quarters?

  Little Furnas now spoke up to remind them that his wife was assistant to a pediatrician, a detail which they had also forgotten. “Helen will be glad to stay with the kids,” this youngest realist promised. He too, like Susan, was observing in himself certain doubts about the validity of this kind of procedure, being also a “creative” writer and hence more sensitive to morals. But his temperament, more equable than Susan’s, was not very long disquieted: he felt sure that it made no difference whose house the meeting was held in; Joe Lockman had rather appealed to him as a type of Chassidic simpleton; he took only a perfunctory interest in Taub’s grievance and its airing. A pale, fat, blond boy with humorous, good-natured, round eyes, he remained in the Taub faction principally from laziness and from a novelist’s feeling for plot. Taub, for his part, looked on him with paternal indulgence; the “discovery” of new talents formed one of his chief relaxations, and he never foresaw the moment when the child would walk unassisted.

  Following Furnas’s offer, the realists hastily dispersed, assuming nonchalant expressions and mingling with the other colonists as though to assure the community that no division of purpose was contemplated and that the conference just ended had been merely a social reunion. In the barn, where partnerships were forming and work-stations being assigned, Powers and Taub and Brown promptly chose partners who were not identified with their faction, put intelligent questions about farm machinery, prophesied rain or drought, according to their temperaments, joshed with the purist women—in their effort to appear unconstrained and matey, they avoided not only each other, but even the eyes of their wives. The purist leaders, for their part, also strove for a natural demeanor. Certain that something was afoot, they did not wish to show alarm or curiosity. They felt that the good of the community now depended on their ability to keep their heads. They had not long to wait; as they separated to go to the fields, they were detained, one by one, by the discreet cough of Harold Sidney, who drew them aside to “wonder” apologetically whether they would be free to drop in at Will’s after supper. To Sidney’s surprise, everyone seemed to know who was meant by the “asocial person” and to take it quite for granted that a meeting should be called to discuss him. Somebody must have talked, he said to himself grumpily, and his thoughts lit on Susan Hapgood with a little sting of satisfaction—Taub told her too much, as he himself had often hinted in the past.

  But Sidney was mistaken; no one knew of Taub’s adventure. The conviction that Joe did not belong here had, in less than twenty-four hours, obtruded itself on all but the most unobservant as an obvious, inescapable fact; and the purist leaders, who had been dreading an attack from the realists on quite another front, now felt positively light-hearted to think that it was only Joe who was in question, and did not stop to inquire what charges the realists could be bringing, once Harold’s face betrayed to them that their guess had been correct.

  They did not condemn the business man; they looked on him as on an erg or a dyne misplaced in the human family. But misplaced he certainly was; the point was a delicate one, and they were aware of inward relief that, thanks to the realists, they would not be put in the position of being the first to raise it. A weight had been shifted from the individual conscience to the deliberative powers of the council as a whole, and the very colonists who had been asking themselves most anxiously how Joe should be dealt with now suddenly stopped thinking about the matter and referred the problem of curbing his energies to the consensus of opinion. Macdougal Macdermott, skirmishing with a last doubt, linked arms companionably with Harold Sidney, as they started up to the forest, and put to him the question that bothered him, just as if this veteran enemy, who fell obediently into step beside him, were in reality an old comrade-at-arms. “How about it, Harold?” he urged, in a tone already hesitant and conceding. “Wouldn’t it be better to ask him to come and talk it over with us himself? More open and above-board?” Sidney shook his head sadly but firmly. A clever and fair-minded man, receptive to discussion and argument, he disliked giving pain, and this, in conjunction with the doctrine of necessity to w
hich he and his colleagues were wedded, had made him somewhat weak and evasive. With his wispy grey hair and grey mustaches, loose clothes and unsettled neck ties, he gave an impression of middle-class goodwill submitting helplessly to force majeure, an impression which was only misleading if one failed to recognize that this relentless law to which he reluctantly yielded was simply the code of self-protection and the desire to have an easy life. Thus, unlike Taub, he appeared always open to conviction, while anchored to unchanging beliefs. His flexible mind extended to take in his opponent’s position and then snapped back like an elastic, with the illusion that it had covered ground.

  “I agree with you,” he was saying to Macdermott. “On the surface, it looks like a raw deal. The man’s out of his depth here; that’s the main point. I recognize that.” It was a peculiarity of Harold’s speech that a certain trick of melodic division, of phrasing in the musical sense, gave his remarks a stilted and unnatural character which he tried hard to remedy by an “easy” and colloquial diction. The result was that he created an effect of speciousness, even when he was most in earnest. “Now take the actual situation,” he continued. “We call him in for a discussion. He gets sore. What do we do? You know yourself what people are.”

  Mac did not press the point; he still felt unsure in his own mind what attitude he ought to take to the capitalist and hoped to thrash one out in the course of the evening’s debate. He was never quite certain what he thought about anything until he had tested his opinion for seaworthiness in the course of some polemical storm. His own objections to Joe had rested wholly on pacifist grounds. The sound of gunfire upset him, yet he was far from positive that his uneasiness had a theoretic justification. The taking of human life was not at issue in target-practice (except, of course, by accident), and to cite the danger of accidents was to avoid the nub of the difficulty. People were killed every day by reapers, stoves, falls in the bathroom, and many good things had been used for bad ends—oil, steel, coal, human beings themselves. Was it the gun as such that he opposed or its utilization in warfare and murder? If the gun, then he opposed hunting, and in that case he ought, by logic, to oppose the slaughter of domestic animals. Here, however, Mac had baulked. It had often been said of him by his adversaries, that he would end in vegetarianism, and though of late years he had been admitting with a good deal of combative energy, “Yes, of course, I’m a crank, a crank like Thoreau and Gandhi!” the identification of himself with these distinguished predecessors betrayed his real view of the label. He did not hold eccentric views gladly; he felt that they were imposed on him by the inexorable clarity of his intelligence, but he was firmly resolved not to take the last step, to resist vegetarianism to the end, whatever temptations it offered him, as though by belying the prophecy he could prove his intellectual freedom and set destiny at naught. Now, it was with something of the emotions of Oedipus on hearing the shepherd’s tale that he had found himself, on this fine spring morning, brought, by the process of his own reasoning, to the brink of fulfilling the words of those ideological oracles who were determined to type him, resist and splutter as he would.

  In his relief at finding that others, and not pacifists either, felt the same way as he did about gunfire (what else could Sidney be alluding to?), he let the subject lapse into a comfortable disorder. An antipathy to firearms, he supposed, went pretty deep in human nature—there was no need, really, to push it any further. Time enough, he promised himself, to argue procedure at the meeting and work out a formula for action consistent with respect for the individual. The warm sun, the sound of the axes in the forest, where clearing was already beginning, the small flask of wine in his pocket made him feel sportive and friendly. He clapped Harold on the back, confident that he had misjudged him in the real world down below where the pressures of society distorted natural relations; and they worked side by side all morning, the editor taking his cue from the man of practicality, who was an expert woodsman, like many city intellectuals who retain, in the midst of cynicism, this single link with boyhood. “Burying the hatchet, eh?” Taub remarked with a genial lift of his eyebrows, as he came upon them together somewhat later in the morning; his corns had begun to hurt him, down below in the kitchen garden, where he had been put to work following the plough with a lime-bag and sweetening the newly turned soil. From each according to his capacities was the cardinal principle of the colony, in labor as well as in morals, and Taub, acting on this injunction, had readily subcontracted his task to the girl student, who had been standing at the end of a furrow, watching him with lively, amused grey eyes. He had spent so many years in executive positions that it seemed to him quite fitting that someone younger than himself, and less powerful in a worldly sense, should take over whatever was onerous in the work of the day. The sense that he had other, more important duties to attend to persisted with him here, and quite naturally so, since he had persuaded himself of this truth once and for all by referring the importance from the duties to himself. It was, in fact, with the genuine feeling of conferring a favor that he passed the heavy bag on to Irene and went off to his cottage to soak his feet, emerging shortly afterwards to prowl about the property with a preoccupied and restless air, stopping here and there to check up appreciatively on the progress of the various enterprises (“Hard at work, eh, Preston?”), note the formation of partnerships, and the labor potential of his friends. And there was in his behavior something so natural, so apparently instinctual, as though he had been a lynx obeying the order of its kind, to roam in unsurfeited watchfulness while others did their slumberous toil, that no one grudged him this leisure, not even Joe, who, after the previous evening, had felt a protective concern for him, and this morning, from time to time, would wipe the sweat from his brow and anxiously shade his eyes, to pick out the ubiquitous Taub wherever he might be on the property, pacing up and down with his soft, creaking step, or flung weightily at last into the hammock, his hands folded over his belly.

  Had Taub been informed of Joe’s kindly feelings toward him, it would have had no effect on the determination he brought that night to the meeting. An expression of esteem from a person he was bent on destroying only increased his contempt and inflamed his punitive fervor by removing the fear of reprisals. Incorruptible in vengeance, he could not be swayed, either, by pity, which he looked on as a form of bribery offered to the softer emotions. Money and fame also were incapable of deflecting his anger, for these attributes became loathsome to him when he saw them in “the wrong hands.” It irritated him to be quietly reminded, as he was repeatedly during the course of the day, by members of the council, and even by his own wife, that the colony was being run through contributions, on a wholly voluntary basis. He himself had contributed nothing to the enterprise, beyond a small down-payment on his cottage, not because he was miserly (he was capable, in fact, of large-handedness), but because, very curiously, he was physically unable to do so. Many times, at the preliminary council meetings, his hand had reached for his pocketbook and stopped, as if seized by a stranger. His reluctance to be committed held him aloof financially, and the more conscious he grew of the dubiousness of not having given (hearing the treasurer report that a schoolteacher had donated her life-savings), the more he could not give, lest he seem, by making things right, to confess to a previous remissness. The allusions to Joe’s money and generosity infuriated his vanity, and the implication that he, as a realist, did not know his own interests came as the last straw. Receiving his advisors after supper for coffee and a last-minute briefing (no drinks were to be served, as if to mark the unfriendliness of the occasion) he suddenly lost control of himself when Danny Furnas, blinking, asked him whether he had considered the colony’s treasury sufficiently. “Money!” he declared contemptuously. “That’s all you can think about. Macdermott’s sucker!” he cried, his face darkening and swelling with those viscous emotions which rose to his brain like blood clots whenever he was ascribing to some person more scrupulous than himself an act of baseness or venality. “You’re all ali
ke!” he proclaimed, hammering on the table and grinding his teeth together, as though bodily possessed by the Lowest Common Denominator.

  Danny’s milk-blue eyes grew wide and innocent. Looking around at his fellows, he appeared to estimate the truth of this charge. It saved trouble, he found, to treat all statements as if they were meant literally. He nodded thoughtfully twice, pursing his full lips, to indicate that on the whole he was compelled to agree with Taub. Taub, deflected, stared grumpily at his colleagues.

  There was little discussion, after this, between them: they sat leafing through magazines and tinkering with the portable victrola; Macdermott, Sidney reported, would vote with them, and Eleanor also, presumably. This, to his faction’s bewilderment, seemed to make Taub only more moody. He grunted, almost with displeasure, as Harold undertook to show him that his group was in the majority. “Never mind that. Who’s against us?” he demanded, with a slow resuscitation of interest, when the Norells, possibly Haines, and Desmond, the Catholic scholar, were ticked off, one by one, in Harold’s methodical style. “A-a-h, we’ll vote them down!” he spat out, suddenly brisk and businesslike, heaving himself forward in his chair and quailing his followers with a look. From the outset, there had been a clear understanding that the will of the majority was not to be used to coerce a minority, though no actual veto-power had been written into the by-laws, the colonists concluding, from the lesson of historical events, that the veto-power itself in the hands of a stubborn minority could be an instrument of force. Danny Furnas now raised his blond eyebrows into semi-circles of questioning and made a whistling motion with his lips. Not being a sentimentalist, he saw no need for a display of theoretic virtue; his vote would speak for itself. Meanwhile, though mildly, he interposed a new demurrer. “They may resign, Will,” he pointed out, wondering whether he could frighten Taub by the prospect of a colony without workers. “Nah!” said Taub, definitively. “They won’t resign. Where would they go?”