To Look and Pass

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  My mother became less stately and sure after my father’s death, and Livy and I were both pressed, I with the taking-over of all my father’s patients and she with the care of the household. For the first and last time I regretted that I did not have a son to take my place.

  South Kenton settled down into its warm and shining apathy and slowness. Life moved sluggishly, easily. Voices had the clear and languid sound of voices heard in deep and motionless silence. Though I was still in my early thirties I felt that I was growing old. You took root in towns like the South Kenton of thirty-five years ago, became steadfast like its trees, rough of bark like those trees, standing complacently in old gardens. The early years of the century were very quiet and peaceful. I knew I was getting stout, and was glad that all my disquieting thoughts had begun to sink beneath the loam at my roots. I refused to let anything disturb me: old dreams, old desires, and restlessnesses, and discontents. I congratulated myself that I was at last free of the fever. I know now that it is a poor congratulation, a sort of self-betrayal, a subtle treachery. Now it seems to me that men live completely only in their dreams and subtle anguishes, and that peaceful years are years lost.

  Only one thing disturbed me. Livy was quiet, but not peaceful, I knew. She moved softly, spoke gently and honestly, smiled, touched everything tenderly. She was active in church affairs, was at the head of sociables and bazaars, but in some way I knew that she had not taken root as I had. I could not speak to her of this; I could no more approach her than I had been able to approach Dan. Now that I am older I wonder if we don’t all of us live like that, unable to touch anyone else. It has always seemed wrong to me, but then, I had always been a prober. I congratulated myself that I had lost the desire to probe, that I had become willing, without question, to accept things that were offered for my acceptance.

  I never saw Dan. I did not forget him. He was like a dim mountain in the background of my mental landscape. But eventually I grew used to that mountain, did not see it objectively. He never came to see me, and I never went to see him. I passed his farm, and once or twice I thought I saw him in his little fields. But I got no closer. Eventually even South Kenton forgot him, or remembered him with only a dim hatred. Whatever business he did, he did it in Ripley. I never had any desire to see him. I did not wish to be disturbed again, to have the placid calmness of my life broken up into fragments, revealing the dark and mysterious things underneath.

  Sometimes Livy and I took trips to New York, to Baltimore and Chicago. We bought a little motor car, the first in South Kenton, and enjoyed it immensely. I always came home satisfied and happy to return, but Livy, though she said nothing, seemed abstracted for a long time afterwards. I have never asked her, but I think she detested South Kenton.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Nineteen-six. A beautiful, quiet, slow-moving, and tranquil year. I have never known life since to be so sweet and full of peace. It was like a prelude, soft, gentle, sonorous, and majestic, to the turbulent drama of the years to come, the years that were already like low and thunderous drumbeats under the placid gaiety. Life will never be the same, never so stately and peaceful and rich with individual lives. Today I can’t keep up with things, and they bore and distract me.

  The spring of that year seemed especially lovely to me, opulent and warm and full of comfortable laughter. I had not been disturbed by any thoughts for a long time. The peace and slowness of South Kenton were like a golden web in which I, a complacent beetle, was caught and was content to be caught, swinging sleepily under thick vines. I had all the work I needed to do, a comfortable income, a fine old house, a good wife, friends and contentment. It was all I wanted.

  One morning I had a call to attend some farmwoman and set out under golden-green trees glittering in cool, shining air. After I had made my call I turned back to town, riding slowly, singing aloud, my hat removed to the fresh, bright wind. I passed Dan’s farm.

  I had passed it scores of times during the past few years, with only an abstracted glance such as one gives a familiar painting, without experiencing any personal emotion or interest. But today, as I passed, I looked intently at the house behind its pines, at the red, low roof burning ruddily in the spring sunlight, at the blaze of early flowers in the great gardens, at the dazzling whiteness of the newly painted picket fence. A faint gray umbrella of smoke hung over a red chimney, and I could hear the drowsy cluck of chickens and the lowing of a distant cow. The little fields belonging to the house were vividly green and sprouting, the hills on the horizon lavender and jade. I stopped my horse, and then, almost without thinking, I turned in the rutty little road that led to the house. I opened the white gate that led to the garden; I had seen a stooping figure there. It was only when I had closed the gate that I regretted the impulse that brought me here, and if the man in the garden had not raised his head and looked at me intently I would have departed more swiftly than I had come.

  I hitched my horse to the gate post and went towards the man slowly and reluctantly. Another look reassured me that it was Dan, for all the thick short beard, old clothes, and broad bowed shoulders. The eyes were the same, dreamy yet intent, mournful yet indifferent.

  “Hello, Dan,” I said awkwardly.

  There was a moment’s silence. “Hello, Jim,” he said quietly. He looked at his hands; they were coated with wet brown mud. He dropped his trowel and simply rubbed his hands on the legs of his overalls, then offered one hand to me. His clasp was warm and dry, firm and strong. The very touch of him made me acutely conscious of life and vitality. We stood staring at each other for a few moments.

  He had grown old beyond his years; he might have been thirty-five or forty-five or more. His face was sunburned and parched with wind, but a deep sadness and peace lay on it. I had always connected peace with happiness and fulfillment, but I knew now that sadness can also become peace, a real peace that expects nothing and asks nothing.

  “You have a nice garden here,” I said, becoming aware of my own scrutiny.

  He turned and regarded the garden thoughtfully, as though trying to see it with my eyes. He turned back to me with a smile of real and simple pleasure.

  “Yes, it is, isn’t it? Nice. I’ve worked hard on it. You should see it in June, when the roses are out. I’ve got over two dozen varieties. Hardiest flower there is. Other flowers are beautiful, but not the way roses are beautiful.” His voice was a little rusty, as though he did not use it much. He looked at his leafing bushes; I wondered if he were thinking of Sarah’s old garden, sunken in roses. They had been her favorite flower, also. He turned to me.

  “Shall we go in for a minute?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’d like to,” I answered with his own simplicity. Oh, it was easy to do, if one wisely forgot the years and all the things in them, if one could regard events as trivial, no matter how noisy, and one’s own thoughts as the only real and important things. I had a sudden insight into this philosophy of Dan’s; or rather, it was not definite or deliberate enough to be a philosophy. It was just himself.

  When we entered the great old hall with its shining floors and the reflection of the sun bright on them through the fanlight, I saw a youngish woman busily dusting there. “Old Martha’s daughter,” said Dan casually, nodding at her in a friendly manner. She looked a little surlily at me, as though she thought I was intruding.

  We went into the long, low sitting room, the beautiful and comfortable room where Beatrice had been murdered. The sunlight glittered on the little windowpanes, burned richly on the polished furniture, brought out into intricate detail the pattern of the old rug, mingled with the fire, and picked out the red or bright blue of a book binding. I saw that another immense bookcase had been built on one side of the room, and it was thick with volumes.

  I had had a moment’s shrinking about entering that room. I thought it would be haunted by memory of Beatrice. But instantly I felt that she would never haunt this place, even though she had died here. She had not belonged in this room; her presence could
not permeate it. She haunted, rather, the gay new house in South Kenton, which had stood empty and desolate all these years, unwanted. Her presence could enter this place no more than a dark cloud in the sky could enter into the substance of a deep pool.

  We sat down before the fire. The youngish woman brought us, at Dan’s request, a bottle of brandy and two glasses. She peeped at me furtively and with bewilderment; it was apparent that she was amazed that Dan had a visitor. He told me that her husband helped him with his small farming. He spoke of his farm and the little daily happenings on it, the breeding and flourishing of his small stock. And he talked casually, as to a pleasant, though not very intimate, acquaintance.

  I sipped my brandy. I had been uneasy and embarrassed, but it was not long before the slow peace and calm of the place and the man seeped into me. Time had no status here; it was not something to be feverishly followed, a whipmaster with a loud and imperious voice. It was a meek slave who served and was not intrusive. I found myself relaxing; I had been at peace for a long time, but now I realized that my own peace had been static and unprofitable, a mere not-thinking, while here was a peace that realized everything and endured because of that knowledge. I was not aware that a silence had fallen between us until I spoke, and then I remembered that neither of us had said anything for a long time.

  “You are very happy here, aren’t you, Dan?” I asked.

  He looked at me meditatively, as though a little, but not too much, actively surprised.

  “Happy? What is happiness? You don’t know. I don’t know. We all look for it. I looked for it here, alone. I don’t know whether I’m happy or not. I only know that I’m not wracked with voices I don’t want to to hear, faces I don’t care about, eyes that hide nothing and are greedy for everything. I’m not troubled about anything. Nothing at all. Perhaps that is happiness.”

  “Not troubled!” Didn’t his memories trouble him, haunt him, stand about him? I looked at him sharply. He was not looking at me; he puffed on his old pipe and gazed tranquilly into space. And then I knew all at once that they didn’t trouble him. He had been an unwilling and very tired spectator of everything that had occurred, even when he had participated in it. He had “looked and passed,” and found the passing happy. But could it be happy, I thought, troubled? It seemed like a life in death to me.

  “You ought to have been a monk, a Trappist,” I said listlessly.

  He smiled, took his pipe out of his mouth a moment, then returned it.

  “No, Trappists are too concerned with trivial things. Sins; the wickedness of the world.” He smiled again. “Their silence and isolation are too active. Postive negations. Now, I’m not concerned with anything, not even with myself. I am free. You can’t have an ideal, an ambition, a hope or a dream, and be free,”

  I searched my memory for old things I remembered from my schooldays. “Oh, you’re a sort of Buddhist,” I said, pleased that I could dredge this up from the hot and cluttered years that now seemed so exciting. “Looking at your navel. Don’t they believe in Nirvana or something, where one is absorbed into the Infinite, even while aliye, if one persists in looking at the belly button and not hearing or seeing anything?”

  He smiled again. “Nirvana. I don’t think Western religions could understand that. They think it means oblivion. But it doesn’t. It means that it is only when the individual lives in himself completely that he is free. You can’t be free when you let a thousand hands pull you in a thousand directions. Only a man who is absorbed in his thoughts is free. If you let the world in, you are like this bottle of brandy here; everyone takes a drink from you, becomes excited by you, is comforted by you, angered by you, or made drunk by you. And after the world is finished with you, then you are just an empty bottle with a label on you: your name, to let everyone know that once you were a full bottle or had a name.”

  “I’d like to see a civilization conducted under your ideas,” I said somewhat irately.

  He laughed. The laugh came reluctantly, as though it found its natural channels clogged.

  “Oh, I’m not advocating anything for anybody. If a bottle of brandy craves drinkers, let it be drunk. But I prefer not to have anybody drink me. A bottle that stubbornly keeps its cork makes everybody mad; it’s a selfish bottle that won’t give up its blood for some noble cause or family or society. I’ll keep my cork.”

  “Sometimes a bottle that keeps its cork gets smashed,” I said.

  “Well, it still keeps something inviolate. Nobody can drink spilled brandy,” he answered.

  Talk! Talk! And the years ran like a dark river between us, carrying strange cargo which we could not ignore even while we kept silent. I drank some more brandy.

  “You don’t want anything, Dan?” I asked suddenly.

  He shook his head. “Nothing,” he repeated gently.

  I hitched myself closer to him. “Dan, didn’t you ever think about going away, about living? About leaving this place? This isn’t all the world. You could start out new somewheres,” I finished lamely.

  “Where? Why? Wherever I went, Jim, I would take myself with me. I couldn’t get away from myself. I’d still be the same person in New York or Afghanistan. There’s no point in getting away if you can’t get away from yourself.” He smoked a moment in silence, then he turned his distant yet penetrating eyes on me. “I know what you mean, Jim.

  You think I could ‘forget.’ Look at it from your point of view, not mine. Suppose you were a man who had been suspected of killing his wife, and was not quite cleared in everybody’s eyes. You would go away, far away. But news spreads. Someone, anywhere, would have heard about it. They would look at you and think: there’s a man who might have killed his wife. Here, everyone thinks it. It is no news to them. They are used to the idea. I am used to their idea. But to go away, to start again, would be to expose myself to curiosity, to eyes that demanded, to mouths that everlastingly talked. It is horrible to me to think of strange faces, strange voices and towns. It is horrible to think of strangeness, of starting again, as you call it.”

  For one moment I remembered my feverish vision of the exposed brain again, quivering, unprotected, always trying to shrink from curious and alien fingers, always trying to grow a shelter for itself.

  “Even if nobody ever heard,” he continued thoughtfully, “I could never forget. And that is the only thing that matters.”

  Ah, I thought, with exultant sadness, so you do remember!

  “Have another drink,” he said, and filled my glass.

  “Dan,” I said slowly, “I expect I’ve never really known you. When we were kids together, I thought I did. But, I didn’t. And I’ve always wanted to get close to you. I never really had another friend. But I see it’s my fault; I should not have probed into you, demanded anything of you. That’s all you asked of me, to let you be yourself in peace. But none of us did that, until—until recently. We all demand something from each other. You neither demanded nor asked. I wonder how many people there are like you in the world. Quite a few, I think. Some of them try to ‘adjust’ themselves, either because of circumstances or because of some stupid idea of duty. I imagine many of them end up in insane asylums, or commit suicide when they can’t stand the tearing hands any longer. You are what we call a ‘solitary.’ God knows why we consider that abnormal. I always did until now. We know that variations from the norm aren’t really abnormal, but a different species. I don’t know why they think that men who refuse to submit to mental and social cannibalism are abnormal or dangerous. Mass civilization doesn’t seem to me to be so very splendid or valuable. It doesn’t do away with exploitation and cruelty and war and stupidity. Perhaps you are right; perhaps it is only the individual that is valuable or precious. I can’t see why a heterogeneous stew, where everything has lost its identity, is so palatable. I think you’ve had lots of courage; you’ve kept yourself for yourself, yet there have been times when you have come out and done something really vital, when necessary. Men without identities are men without flavor or k
eenness. Yet, civilization’s first effort is to rob men of flavor and keenness. It calls it ‘mass effort,’ ‘collectivism’; something or other about everyone surging forward in a body to accomplish something magnificent. But it never does.”

  I looked at him timidly, expecting a smile of indulgence for my groping difficulty in expressing myself. But I was amazedly gratified to see that he was listening, that his eyes had dilated a little with wonder and pleasure, that he seemed eager and released.

  “Yes? Yes?” he said impatiently.

  I pondered, excited myself. My brain, stirred up from years of peaceful lethargy, moved painfully with new life.

  “It’s funny how ‘civilization’ absorbs, or tries to absorb you. It eats you alive. It constantly demands. ‘Give me your hand, your eyes, your heart, your soul.’ And if you do, you have nothing left. You have to fill the empty places with mass ideals or gestures in unison.”

  “God is a poor substitute for personal integrity,” Dan broke in. And smiled. His teeth glimmered through his beard.

  All at once I felt unhappy and wretched, as though I had wasted something precious. But who did not? Except Dan and Livy. God! He should have loved her! What a horrible waste. When I came to die, what would I have? Nothing. I would be a disintegrated individual. But here was a man who would be integrated, strong in inviolate personalality. Yet this too seemed very sad to me, I don’t know why. Was he right or wrong? Was anything right or wrong? It was exhausting to think about it. I wanted to get away again, where I would not have to think. I stood up.