Fairbairn, Ann

by Five Smooth Stones

  When he spoke it was under his breath. "That's it, baby," he said. "Baby, that's it." She could not tell whether he was speaking to her or the small black child on the canvas.

  Later she grinned across a dinner table at him. "When I'm famous you can brag that you named a Kent canvas."

  "How? What?"

  "'That's it, baby.'"

  ***

  Sara was so delighted with Jedediah after they had met a few times that David told her he was jealous, and she laced her fingers through his as they walked along Southampton Row to Russell Square. "Not really, love?"

  "Nope. Not really. Just enough to keep me interested." Then he frowned down at her, half smiling at the same time. He hadn't seen any adult Londoners skipping on the street, although he'd seen almost everything else.

  "Ooops!" said Sara. "I'm being conspicuous. Sorry."

  The weather was still drippy when he returned to Oxford after that first trip down, leaving a suddenly solemn and quiet Sara. "You're going away again, David—"

  "Gosh, hon, I've got to. They won't move Oxford down here—"

  "Of course not."

  "Come on, baby, don't look like that."

  "Like what?"

  "As though you were seeing ghosts or something."

  "I am. The ghosts of my own feelings, the way they were, the way they could be again—David, you're coming back?"

  "No, I'm not. I'm going to stay up there and let the blues take over, die stone cold daid of loneliness every weekend. Honest.... There's time for one more kiss, sweet... two more... three..."

  But on the journey back, through a countryside still gray, he remembered his conclusions on the first journey: that he would have to assume a maturity he had not shown yet in this situation that neither time nor distance had changed. He had understood Sara better than she realized when she said, "I feel whole again." His only problem, he thought, his only li'l piece of a problem wore a too familiar face: a choice that had been there from the beginning, from a spring evening in Laurel when he had first met a girl with one arm in a green silk sling: the choice between the spiritual disembodiment of separation or the facing of the new problem that would be created in marriage.

  That new problem seemed dangerously simple of solution

  here, four thousand miles away from home and the conditions that would create it. He had been forced to pull himself back time and again from the quicksands of complacency. A few more years, a few more Nottingham riots, a few more thousand black-skinned people on this little island—his inner laugh was a bitter one—and he would probably feel right at home, instead of free and identifiable as a person. But now, riding in an English train compartment, the polite, brief stares of his fellow passengers recognizable as those of curiosity and not of hate or repugnance, that marriage seemed right and possible, Chuck Martin's words, "Who are you, you self-righteous idiot, to look God's gifts in the teeth?" valid and understandable.

  Gramp had said once, "There ain't nothing perfect. 'Cept maybe a new baby—"

  It was all a long way off, even Gramp and Chop-bone and the little house in Beauregard and the Timmins kids across the road, and Isaiah and the Jeffersons. He had not merely come to Oxford, England; he had traveled through immeasurable reaches of space to another planet where he was as all men and he and Sara were as they had been created— male and female, and what had moved on the face of the waters and created life when the world was without form and void had been love.

  ... And it's not that simple... not now or here or anywhere, anytime.... Pull yourself together, Champlin. Here's your station....

  ***

  Identifying early spring in England, David decided, was a matter of bloodstream and bones, and the stirring of the spirit. "It's not just the contrast with that mess that came before. It's different," he told Marcia when she telephoned him one afternoon at Oxford.

  "That it is, David. Our seasons explain us—-"

  "Come on, now. Nothing does that. A complex breed, the British—"

  "Not at all. Well argue it out one day. Right now I'm calling for my husband. He wants you for dinner Saturday night. Jedediah's father has come to London unexpectedly, and he wants you to meet him."

  "Solomon of Zambana?"

  "So biblical, isn't it? Like Saul of Tarsus, or Jehosaphat of Judah. And he's a bit of a biblical character. No beard, of course."

  "Why 'of course'? I was thinking—"

  "David Champlin, don't you dare!"

  "All right, mum. I won't. What time? I'd sure like to meet him."

  "Early; that is, for you. Lawrence wants to talk with you first."

  "Have I done something I shouldn't?"

  "No, pet. And it wouldn't be any of our business if you had. He just wants to discuss certain things with you. Around six?"

  "Hunter—"

  "Just you, my dear. Not even our dearly beloved son this time. Not even Sara."

  "Gosh—"

  "Sixish—?"

  "I'll be running—"

  ***

  Spring in London wasn't true; it was a miracle that couldn't possibly happen, yet it had, and David marveled, as a man does at miracles. Everything seemed illusionary: the blaze of yellow jonquils in the windowboxes of a huge, grime-blackened building wasn't the brightness of flowers, it was summer sun that had been stored within that building through the long gray winter and transplanted now to reassure the passersby that all was still ordered and well with God's plan for the seasons. In the parks the buds were a green mist against the sky and the brick and concrete, and in Trafalgar Square the lions basked, waiting for the summer the young sunlight promised.

  On the Saturday he was to dine at the Travises', he and Sara ate lunch in Hyde Park, took undergrounds, and strolled through brighter streets than he had ever seen before. They shopped for clothes for Sara and a light blue pullover for him, and as they walked down Oxford Street he said: "Go ahead, honey chile. Skip. If I didn't have a gimpy leg I'd skip too."

  "Like a young lamb gamboling on the green?"

  "We-ell, not exactly." Then he said, "Don't say it."

  "Say what?"

  " 'O, Wind, If Winter comes'—"

  "Stoopid. But six o'clock comes, and we have to get back so you can spruce up for whatever in the world it can be that Lawrence wants to talk to you about."

  "It just about has to be some legal something or other he wants me to take up with Brad when I get back—"

  ***

  He wondered as he walked toward the Travis house what a man was supposed to call the top guy in an African state. Chief? He'd heard that "Chief was derived from European influences. Your Highness? Your Royal Highness? Mr. Abikawai?

  With the Travis house just ahead now, he began to feel nervous. What in hell did Lawrence Travis want of him? Lawrence Travis and, for God's sake, a man called Solomon of Zambana? If it was legal matter, he wished he'd brought a notebook.

  Parsons greeted him with a rosy smile. "Nice to see you, sir.... Lovely day it's been.... Mrs. Parsons and I were saying just last week 'O, Wind, If Winter comes'... I'll just hang it up for you.... Mr. Travis is in the study...."

  But Lawrence Travis had come out of the study to greet him and was standing in the center of the hall. "Glad you could make it early, David. What'll it be? A drink, tea, coffee? If Marcia was here it would be tea, ready or not. She'll be back for dinner, by the way—"

  "Coffee. You-all don't know it yet, but the next time I come to England I'm moving in—just for that coffee."

  Because there had never been a reason for a private talk with Lawrence Travis before, David had never been inside the study. As he entered he blinked at books so numerous that they had to be stacked on tables and even on chairs here and there. And, he remembered, there were fully as many in their apartment in New York.

  "Gosh, the annex of the Bodleian—"

  Travis laughed. "I could use that space, couldn't I? Wait —sorry, David, I'll have to clear that chair—" As he removed books and papers from the chai
r beside the fireplace and the coffee table in front of it, he said: "It's what comes of not getting inside a school until I was ten.... My grandmother was what the folks down there called a 'good reader.'... Her mother had learned from the people she belonged to as a slave. They'd be damned as liberals today.... Grandmother taught me until the year we got a horse as well as a mule.... The nearest colored school was eight miles—"

  "And the nearest white?"

  "Two.... Three.... Sit down, David. We'll need that fire soon, spring or no spring." As David took his seat, Travis smiled across at him from his own seat on the other side of the grate. "Res' yo'se'f, man."

  David chuckled, smiling contentedly. It was good to hear someone say something like that, unafraid of ridicule. He was at home. Always when he met his own kind of people in a world of whites there was this inner content, this sense of relaxation, of coming home; even, he had often thought, if he didn't happen to like the particular individual he was with.

  "Y'all better stay 'way from that bandana-haid talk, Mr. Travis. You fixin' to get yourself read out of the race by us enlightened Negroes."

  Travis laughed again, an easy, relaxed man here in his own study, still young looking, little gray in the dark hair, and showing no trace of the weight of the responsibilities he had carried, the crises he had weathered, the instant, agonizing judgments he had been forced to make in situations where not even his government could help him. A real great man, thought David, and here I am with him, the two of us like a couple of old friends sitting on the porch steps on a hot southern night.

  "Enlightenment and forgetfulness of the past aren't necessarily the same," Travis was saying. "Forgetfulness of the dark areas of the heart and mind that existed before is not, in my opinion, a corollary of enlightenment. And, as far as that is concerned, how do you define enlightenment?"

  "I don't. Not me. I know a lot of guys who think they can, but I'll pass that one."

  "That's wisdom. By the way, Brad sends his best. So does Peg."

  "Are they both all right? Brad writes once a month when he primes the pump. I sure miss him."

  "He's fine. Peg—-" Travis held out one hand, palm down, turning it from side to side. "It's a crying shame."

  They talked through two cups of coffee, and David through four small sandwiches. "Sara and I went walking and shopping today. Makes you hungry," he said apologetically.

  "I wish there weren't such long absences between our brief meetings, David. I always have the fear that the next time we meet you will have grown up."

  "Gosh, I thought I had."

  "Somewhat, David, somewhat. Not entirely. Wondering why you're here so early—by request?"

  David remembered another night years before, when he had heard Brad say, in almost that same tone, those same words: "Wondering why you're here?"

  "Well," he answered, "I can't help being curious."

  "In the Bible there's something about the last shall be first."

  "Yes, sir."

  "I'm no Bible student, in spite of having been brought up by a grandmother who knew it, so help me, from cover to cover, including the 'begats.' And she was great on prophecy. She said she was born with a veil."

  "Are you serious, sir?"

  "Hardly. For one thing she prophesied the end of the world once too often. Also the freedom of our people. Both were always just around the corner. It shook my faith. Besides, I'm enlightened, as you just remarked."

  David laughed. "Anyhow, the State Department thinks so."

  "David, if the people all over the world with whom I've negotiated and dealt in various ways, and have won over to our side, had one half the mother wit she had, I wouldn't be the 'esteemed Mr. Travis.' I'd be back where I came from, practicing law in Boston, Massachusetts, believe me."

  "Believe you? Heck, I know it."

  Travis absently poured more coffee into their cups. "Where was I?"

  "The last was being boosted up to first. When a Negro says something like that, he's usually referring to his own people."

  "I am. Africa."

  "Africa!"

  "Yes." Travis was deadly serious now. "The dark continent, some call it. In my opinion, and that of many others, the cradle of the future, just as it was the cradle of the far-distant past. Perhaps not the future of my generation, or of yours, or even your children, but the future of the world, nonetheless. And times a'wasting for it to start moving. There seems a strange parallel, perhaps unrelated but interesting to observe, in the emergence of Africa as a power to be reckoned with, and the stirrings in our South. And in our North, too, among our people. When I was at home this last trip I went to Atlanta and New Orleans—not by choice—"

  "Gramp wrote me about it. Thanks for seeing him—"

  "Don't thank me. You deserve the thanks. His gumbo, David! I thought I knew something about it—but I don't. It could win him a diplomatic post; it shows wisdom, judgment, and deviousness. However, what I am getting at is the general feeling in the South, the sense of ferment, of preparation. One can almost hear a bugler blowing softly just before he sounds 'Charge!' So it is in Africa, at the same moment in time."

  "I agree it's interesting to think about."

  "Africa will fly off in all directions at first, like the old woman with the wooden leg. But her people will learn. And by a circuitous route that brings me to you."

  David grinned. "Anything I can do to add to the confusion—"

  "It won't be exactly little, although it may not be world shaking. Still, one never knows. Last fall the suggestion came to me through—let's say a mutual friend, that I give some thought to proposing your name to the Department of State for a post in Africa."

  David was conscious of no surprise; it had been obvious that Lawrence Travis had been leading up to something of the kind, but he could find no words. He was almost expecting what Travis said next.

  "Zambana, to be exact.... You'll recall that Jedediah went home for a month just after he got to England? It dovetailed nicely."

  "How do you mean?"

  "That his father called me, asked me a great many questions about you, and has indicated that he would be pleased to have a young man, well versed in constitutional and international law, with good judgment and a level head, assigned to his country as an adviser to him. He of course can only express a desire. He is a tactful man. And a pragmatic one. And not at all ignorant of the fact that his country is wealthy —very wealthy—and strategic. Zambana's friendship, once the country is independent, which it will be in a few months, will be a damned juicy plum. He is hardheaded, dedicated, and won't play favorites. Still—"

  It was coming too fast now; David wasn't taking it in; he knew he wasn't and he hesitated, trying not to let his mind jump ahead of Travis's words. "Mr. Travis—please—you're going too fast for me. You don't need to tell me that it was Hunter who made the first move. Let me kind of sort it out. You are thinking of proposing my name—David Champlin's —to the State Department—"

  "Department of State—"

  "Yes, sir—Department of State for some kind of advisory job in Zambana? When?"

  "It's been done."

  "Good God!"

  "You must file a formal application, of course."

  "But there's a hell of a lot of red tape and waiting, isn't there? Security check and so on—"

  "Yes. In this instance the check is almost completed."

  David was on his feet now, prowling the small room, winding up finally at a window in the side wall overlooking a passageway between this house and the next, a passageway that was half alley and half thoroughfare, where spring had not yet come. It was a far cry from the recreation hall at Pengard and the day Tom, Chuck, and Suds had angered him by taking over the reins of his life, practically cinching a job for him that he hadn't even known about. But in this situation any such resentment as he had felt then would be stupid. This was the way things were done in the echelons in which Travis moved. He supposed that the government would go ahead and throw a security
check on a guy even if he only wanted to be a grocery clerk, if the right person asked for it. It wasn't a thought that exactly made for peace of mind.

  When he turned back into the room his smile was bitter. "I can't," he said. "It's out. Let's forget it."

  "Why, David?" Lawrence Travis's eyes were on his face and its bitter smile, and his voice was gentle, as gentle as the voice of the porter on the Humming Bird had been the first time he had taken a train, humiliated and sick-angry. "Why, David?" asked Travis again.

  "Because I'm a Negro." There was no inflection in the voice, and David's eyes were without warmth, without anger, without any emotion whatever, flat and black.

  "You're out of your mind, David." Travis said it quietly. "That has nothing to do with it. Actually—"

  "Mr. Travis, I know what you're going to say. You know that when I was at Pengard I was Jim-Crowed in a unique way. The rumor was started by two southern gentlemen—one the real thing as our society judges gentlemen, the other a phony—that I was a homosexual. The Department of State wouldn't touch me with a barge pole. So—that's the ball game. And thanks—I mean, really thanks."

  "David." Travis walked over to him, took his arm and led him back to his chair, almost forcing him into it. "I'm sending for drinks. They're called for right now. Do you think for one minute that I didn't make sure that this was thoroughly checked out? Have you forgotten the investigation and the report that Prentiss made? Those were available to the FBI. Even Clevenger was interviewed and said nothing harmful. Goodhue—" Travis chuckled—"said he didn't remember you except vaguely, that he was sure he would if there had been anything like that. You came out of that phase of the investigation with an absolutely clean bill of health."

  David said nothing for a moment, then began to laugh. It was not what Chuck called his "blockbuster" laugh; it was a gentle laugh.

  "Let me study about it, Mr. Travis. Just for a while."

  ***

  Later, while Travis was greeting his friend Solomon Abikawai in the sitting room, David managed to whisper to Jedediah, "Man, am I glad to see you. I was scared you wouldn't be here." Before Jed could do more than smile reassuringly, Travis took David's arm and led him toward the man he had come to meet. "Biblical" had been a good word; Solomon was taller than his son; his skin had a more brownish cast, and the lines in his face were deeply grooved. He was a spare, stern man, with the powerful shoulders so noticeable in Jedediah. His eyes held more reserve than his son's; his voice was heavier and deeper. He wore native costume, a deep crimson robe over a long white undergarment, and David tried to convince himself it was a case of clothes making the man, that he was not really that sternly regal, but found himself awed and tongue-tied nonetheless. A formidable .guy, he thought, and probably a damned astute one, and he wished this meeting was in actuality what it appeared to be on the surface—a purely social one, and not with himself as a specimen to be judged, because this man's judgments would be without tinge of emotion, impersonal, just, and, once made, not subject to appeal. Not even the surprising warmth of his smile reassured David; Solomon the Stern, that was this man. Not once was he aware of any direct scrutiny by Abikawai, only those casual glances any man gives another in a small, friendly gathering.