Trust: A Novel Part 32

"Extortioner."

"Call him what you please," William said. Now the window had gone black. "Seven o'clock, and dark. September. But don't call him a court jester. He was never amusing. Your mother and I never found him amusing," he said. "Though your mother did. Then never again. Never again. She suffered. Under another set of chances she might have thrown it all off. Under a different star, so to speak."

"You mean if not for me," I offered once again.

"If not for you," he acknowledged finally. "She had to live it through. She has thought always how you must be kept safe from him. It has been her preoccupation. It has been her obsession. It has been her cross. He would have told you what you were."

I said, "What I am."

"It would have been unspeakable to do. It would have been hideous to do. It could never have been allowed."

"Until you could do it yourself."

"Until," he contradicted, "it had to be done." And I saw the worm of his mouth coil.

"I don't blame you," I said. "You've done it to save my mother the job."

"You were never to have been told. Your poor mother," poor William had to say again, lifting the weight of his head and mourning after some secret vision perhaps too literal for his tethered imagination to wonder at; but it was years too late for remorse. She had thrown the book of flowers, those vulnerable beauties, into the rain-barrel, she had thrown her Sh.e.l.ley into the tunnel of the sea, the black spray of flies flew up, the white flies of the foam flew up: ENCHIRIDION and the unbodied joy given water-burial, flowers and flower sent grotesquely down to swell; and the next day they saw her book floating just beneath the water's membrane like a cinder trapped under a finger-nail, the pages winging outward and bloated, the pages like the wavering limbs of an undersea anemone, waverings of print speckled over them as indistinct as filaments and anthers in a field. Did he think he could recall it now?-he who had nearly praised her for the loss, and chided fantasy out of existence? Did he think he could turn back the sea and its salt from the drowned wound? Did he think he could turn back her face from the undiscoverable lighthouse in the view? There is no retrieving, there is no redeeming. Her white socks left shapeless craters behind her in the sand. It was September then, and dark. The honeymoon ended.

Then the new house, built for them by both their fathers, because she would not live in that other house, all empty and receptive, where she had grown up, though William was willing enough; he was fonder of his father-in-law than of his own father, that pleasureless man of meagre desires, who looked on life as a pyramid to be raised brick by golden brick, the whole to be rewarded by an angelic sermon from its peak on the Last Day, and by the solidity of the structure in the meantime. Allegra's father was something else: scoffed at Adam if not at Eve and marched eagerly up and down his beach, swinging the keys of his mansion from a chain attached to a polished seash.e.l.l. He liked to think of himself as a mariner, though all he knew of s.h.i.+ps was Cunard saloons and waiters gliding sidle-hipped by on the incline of a scarcely-felt crest. But he wanted his daughter; the very beach, he claimed, demanded his daughter; and he promised to build a wall through the garden and give her half for her private own, and half the house, and half the staff; or, failing that, to go away himself, the old aunt with him. But she despised that place, her father's estate, which he had made in pleasurable celebration of his voyages of pleasure-it was too gaudy, it was too splendid, it was a horrid oversized peac.o.c.k of a house teetering on haughty skinny legs pointlessly at the water's edge, with its s.h.i.+ning tail foolishly upraised. A foolish place-a whim and not a house, with all the goose-faced Kings of France jutting from dark panels in the dining room, and stuffed with a mult.i.tude of leisured maids and serving-men, and the aged aunt's tremulous night-shouts out of dreams, and the big marble anchor in the garden-a fountain breathing s.h.i.+ny gla.s.sy sea-water up and down the anchor's immense and pointless flank hour after hour, with a sound like road-traffic. She despised her father's house; she did not like to stay where she had been a girl; rooms in which the girl has walked and stalked cannot be where walk and stalk the perils and blisses of the world; and it was the world she wanted. So they went instead to Scarsdale and the new house, all triumphant oaken Tudor. But she could not praise the new house, either; and, spiting the gift of father and father-in-law, she had lived as though it had been drilled through with secret pa.s.sages. Her decorating notions were anything but conventional; she re-invented. The beds had chalky posts and purple canopies, the windows went without cloth or shades to cover domestic tableaux, dresser drawers perpetually ajar hung out their tongues of sleeves, the young wife's easels stood in doorways and had to be squatted under to pa.s.s through, telephones came by twos in every room. Often they all rang together. People called her up. Who, who? There were m.u.f.fled talks. Then almost immediately the vast Arthurian table arrived from the East, and she split her shoe in the spite of punis.h.i.+ng it. Though it was still early autumn there were no screens: she liked the sound of a buzzing hornet nosing the ceiling in the first sigh of morning. She ate heated canned asparagus, the yellow tips fragile and b.u.t.tery, for a week at a time. The cook quit, and was replaced by a Moslem in a sari. William yowled at curry on his lip. She hated maids and hired an English lad to mop underneath the beds, where a crop of luscious dust-curds bloomed like rose-heads; she gave him a whole wall on which to paint a prehistoric mural-and there, at night, when the hornets returned to their eaves, a crimson pterodactyl battered a turquoise horizon filled with mastodon and tyrannosaurus rex. Though the English boy's style was true primitive, the room remained a room and not a cave; and his mistress snapped her fingers angrily and told him he was a coward to be afraid, just because it gargled, of a vacuum-cleaner. The thirty telephones-the twenty? the forty? the fifty?-rang at once. Every afternoon she hid away to write long, long letters, all benign. Answers jostled one another's thicknesses in the mailbox: "I am happy indeed that you so much liked my poem, 'Sicilian Intensities,' which was recently published in The Toreador Review. Rare is it, and therefore ravis.h.i.+ng, revivifying, for a New Mexico poet like myself to receive unbridled recognition from so distant, yet so discerning, a reader; from a reader of sensibility; and I will, indeed, as you suggest, telephone you at your residence if Fortuna, that unpredictable G.o.ddess, should ever bring me to New York ... P.S. I am enclosing, for your private perusal, a sheaf of six as-yet-unpublished poems which comprise the early part of a cycle, Tiresias at Taos,' begun some fifteen or twenty years ago. Perhaps you recall seeing Strophe Nine, beginning (and also ent.i.tled) 'How Blind We Are to the Day of Our Death!' which was to have been printed in the November issue of The Sweeper. Unfortunately the magazine was only just discontinued in October. Nevertheless the poem is, I may add, explicitly antidadaist in theme and execution..."

"Have children," Allegra's father said; "have sons quickly." It was now too cold to stand for long on the beach. He rambled instead in those gigantic rooms, moving from window to window to survey the mutating color of the sea. His own skin was altering; it was rather too falsely ruddy a sailor's hide. He was tired. Corporations were corpses to him now; he left his affairs to William, who had a talent for them. "Have sons," he only seemed to joke, "then you needn't depend on the alien nature of a son-in-law to take things over. Because consider: if not for that brother of yours, not that I'm saying anything against Helen and Marie, they're both nice girls, if not for Max where would I be now? You don't think your father would've handed you over to me, just like that, if he hadn't had another to keep for himself-and who would I have at this stage of the game to watch out for my interests? Dynasty is destiny, keep that in mind! And tell it to Allegra. It's b.l.o.o.d.y threats from her if I say it. Some people grow sterile waiting for a good philosophical reason for progeny. There isn't any. Tell it to Allegra! She's an eccentric, you know. That's not the same as a Bohemian, though it may seem so to you. I've seen them all over the world, including the East-eccentrics, I mean. Bohemianism is the product of a society of wealth-meat to protest against: it's no use being a Utopian vegetarian among the Hindus, say-but even the poorest have their oddities, that's a fact. I'll tell you what makes an oddity." He liked to talk to William. He thought him a wary young man, he knew his daughter was a fool, and he was pleased and even excited by the possibilities in combining elements. The irregularity of it, when outwardly it had all the appearance of propriety, teased his fancy. He waited for them to mate. Curiosity made him long for grandchildren; he supposed they would be fools and prigs, though he hoped, provided there were enough of them, for a canny one in the lot. "An oddity is stuffed," he explained, leading his son-in-law into a tall downstairs cavern he had without humor named his Marine Room, "with wis.h.i.+ng. It's wish, wish, wish from the day they're born. Look, you understand sin. Then I tell you it's a sin to be an oddity. It's to commit the Sin of Vicarious Living. It's wish, wish, wish-and for what? For a picture in the heart. There's no cure but distraction. Don't be modern, you hear?-have sons quickly." Table followed table: and on each an uncanny clutter of green bottles, fetid, murky, filled with round eyes and fog and dark blue smear-oh, vile, and like a laboratory-heart kept alive with all its robot valves exposed and dimly working. "Nice, see? Pickled fish," he said, "not that I have the things cla.s.sified, though I wish I did. I wouldn't know how. You're a geologist, right?-but I'm only a beachcomber. It's not a system I am showing you, mind you-it's simply the occupation of my senile years. The poor old woman hates the smell-I tell her it's not the sea-things themselves, only the solution they're in. The pickle they're in, ha ha. My wife wasn't fussy-she didn't only tolerate, she admired. A good woman-my only friend, so to speak, I mean when you get down to it-she was sick for maybe fifteen years before she went. I meandered around the world without her now and then. 'She went'-I once heard a captain speak that way of a s.h.i.+p gone down. I suppose that's why Allegra grew up all fads and no religion: an oddity, my daughter, drowned in wis.h.i.+ng. People are wrong, you know, when they talk of Mother Earth. It's Father Neptune who takes us in our last days. Not dust unto dust-never mind the Bible. Offended, boy? But blood is salt water, like the sea, which never left us though we left it They say the dolphin has an intelligence equal to, if not better than, man's. All right-at least the dolphin had the sense not to throw up his sacred home for the ash of land. All of mankind's wrung with drunkard's thirst for the sea. In my view that's the explanation for religion. Would Sinai have been possible if it hadn't been preceded by the Red Sea? And all those fishermen, and water-walking and all of that, and loaves and fishes at Galilee! Did you ever look hard at the backbone of a fish? There's a crucifix hidden in the skeleton; make of that what you want. And Tao, where they say the Way is like water-it's there too, reality, I mean. Why does a man salivate? Why does he bleed? You're on the wrong track with those rocks of yours. Who cares how old the earth is? It's all iron anyhow: a fleck of iron. Nothing reproduces unless it has sap in it: chew a weed for proof if you like, or smash a bug. Your rocks are tellurian ash. Sterile; sterile. What's wrong with my daughter? Have sons! I've given this place a secret name, you see. Duneacres because it sits at the seaside-that's only picturesque. But intimately between me and me it's Doomacres. I've built on silt. The sea will come up, the tide will come and pull it down. I give it twenty sound years-that's more than long enough for a sand castle, and the anchor won't tie it down, the anchor won't do it any good-the anchor's stone. Stone is ash; wishes are ash. Have sons, have sons!"

There was a swarm of servants everywhere, idling, idling: schools of servants paddling by on elaborate non-errands. He was lonesome, the old man. His skin darkened to grape, and he laughed it off, diagnosing his dying: "I'm marooned"-and spread his hands to show himself the fat incredible maroon veins. But the aunt died first, complaining how the place smelled of fish and disinfectant, wailing that the summer storms (it was January) frightened her-the crackle of lightning on the water so close it started static in her gold bridges. So he raised the anchor and lowered it, in between burying her beneath it-the ground opened, and the vaguely delightful stench of marsh weed rose up and hung. h.o.a.r-frost and miasma tickled in his shoes. He thought how the house would be, death-abandoned, and the woodland around it and the beach and the dock below it. "There's only one good reason for children, and the reason's not philosophical. It's to fill the bedrooms. I married too late for it, my wife was old, then sick, maybe only the sickness of being too old to fill the bedrooms, but still, we had one daughter, an oddity, and she doesn't fill the bedrooms of her own house, except with telephones. Things being what they are, 111 give the place to the sea. Every room to be a mansion for Neptune-sea-nymphs everywhere. Thetis and all the Nereides-I forget their idiotic names. Go and get me scientists: experts, I mean, on sea-nymphs. Men with an idea of the majesty of wetness. Salt! Get brains with plenty of salt. Finny fellows, ha ha! Offices upstairs, galleries downstairs, or vice-versa. I don't know-get an architect who does. I want the outside intact though-the lines of the place intact, widow's walk and all, the garden stays as it is, no little city starting up on the beach, the wood left alone. I don't want the sand castle tumbled, you see? It's got to look as though the ocean could lap it up any time it felt like it. Which it can. Hours of talk between you and me, this means. A long story, vast plan, deep blueprints. The more I think, the more devoted I get to this magnificence. I mean it to be magnificent, you understand me? Big tanks, living things, but not just an aquarium, mind you. Let it be a History of the Origin of Life. You understand me? Don't you? A rock can't comprehend the wash of the tide. Then convert yourself. Right away. Salt and sap, that's what I'm after. Go ahead, draft the deed of trust. The will has it all to Allegra; but she doesn't want it; anyhow it's time I did something public. A public thing, this will be. A museum."

And died; died, the old man, hurrying after the anch.o.r.ed aunt. Of him were ashes made; and Allegra, multiplying the tear-salt sea, stood on the dock and at a sign from the minister-a Unitarian-threw into the water whitish earth of her father. "No one could say of him," said the minister, saying what no one would say, "that he was not a visionary." A pretty remark, suitable, but like all grave-side summaries only wishful. A visionary? That selfish old man who could not bear to see the circlets of spittle on his wife's half-paralyzed lip, and went out year after year to watch instead the spume of liners? But a man who foists on posterity a monstrous piece of real estate with the intention of compelling a hundred people to produce out of it what no one had remotely thought necessary, whether for public education or edification or elevation or enervation-what else shall he be called if not a visionary?-short of philanthropist, a word saved only for the really wicked. He had pretended, Allegra's father, to be one of those old buccaneers of business: he fattened his speech with fake coa.r.s.e riches, and toughened his stride, and praised his bookish weak unhappy wife for loving Emerson, and did all those eager rough vulgar things one expects of a money-pirate in America, quite as though he had swiped all the money himself, starting from the plain scratch of ambitious poverty. He was as bold as any ruffian of the nouveau riche, and all to smother the fact that he had (like William's father) been born into seven generations of Hudson Valley railroad-padded burgher-pride; and he spoke of the old feeble spinster-aunt (who sweated in winter) as though she had been in early days a barmaid he had pinched away to a palace for the protection of her honor.

Yet Allegra mourned him, and complimented the Unitarian who had complimented her father who had complimented her mother for loving Emerson; in the end perhaps it was simply her mother whom she mourned. For a servant came upon a box of letters from her mother to her father (they had to clear out the top of the house for the first crew of renovators), in envelopes addressed to Eastern ports: letters which had never been mailed. And the bookish weak semi-paralyzed unhappy lover of Emerson wrote accusation after accusation-"fraud," cried the greenish-become ink in ancient penmans.h.i.+p, "fraud and bigamist; fraud and polygamist: Solomon not as to wisdom but to wives: how many sons, offspring, progeny, boys, children, babies half-Asiatic, half-Arab, half-Mongol, half-black, half-brown, half-yellow, from those far-ranging loins?"-and every bitter violent letter sealed into its envelope and stamped and ready to be posted and never sent. Of course it was all a fantasy; and perhaps her mother had even known it was a fantasy; but was it a fantasy less plausible than her father's quixotry of a museum of the waters? Her mother's mouth was twisted, and her womb grown dry. The eyes of her remorse saw sons, none hers. "You don't want to mind it, dear; don't mind it," William said of the letters, concealing his horror and his scorn. Meanwhile they watched the servants dig into niches and make small notes on where the stairs whined, and whisper to the masons how the cellar ran with long-antenna'd silverfish, quick-footed sc.u.m like insect-mice; and Allegra said, "I don't mind. What if he did? What if he did? After she died didn't he go sailing on someone's yacht with a black flag up for grief? Didn't he go out to the Indies wearing a black armband all the way? And anyhow love is for the taking-it's nourishment, like wheat, and ought to be generally available." But William in the shock of that began to wonder whose taking love was for. Never, never had she given her white face to him, and she kept, besides, a careful calendar of when in the month's length he lay with her; and she went habitually to dangerous lectures, and told him afterward what the speaker had declared, that love bound by the chains of duty was not free. "The chains of duty?" he echoed her-he whose Sunday lesson had always taught that the truest freedom of all was doing what one must. But she would not say more, and instead battled with him about what was being made of her father's house. "It's evil, evil," she said, "all that effort and all that money for something that won't do a bit of practical good in the world! If he wanted to do good why didn't he at least pension off the servants? The kitchen people at least-after all those years! I want to give them pensions. Fix it so I can give them pensions, William. That's the whole point of Social Security!-then the Government would do it, and it wouldn't have to be just charity and being at the mercy of the capitalist conscience. In the Soviet Union all the workers get pensions, it's only fair," and while William listened without hope, she told of strikes and scabs, and riots against management, and employers with iron rods: all that drab lexicon of her tedious clubs. He knew about those clubs; even at Miss Jewett's she had gone to Social Justice Teas, but he had always regarded these as more than innocent, even as exhilarating-she wore a jumper and held high a banner with bare fists and wrists and arms so delectable to the very nerve of his eye, that, contemplating her, he felt a breath from his cautious lung could disperse her, she hung like a spider from an insubstantiality, the sun provoked her wandering sign into silk. It said "Colonialism is Napoleonism Made New" or "The Amalgamated Peoples of the Earth Decry Mississippi Miscegenation Laws," or "The Aspiring Negro is Our Brother," or "Honest Labor is the True Aristocracy of America's Future" or "Greed for Profits is the Workers' Loss: The Bosses' Gain is Labor's Cross" or "What Shall it Profit the Prophets of Management?" or "PEACE PEACE WORK WORK." The words pirouetted like Pavlovas; the poles spun; the band-aid signs purported to heal what William's G.o.d had not healed in all the centuries of obeisance; the band-aid signs rose and descended, aspired and denied themselves; William's breathing rose and descended, aspired and denied itself, and he pitied her error for being not error, but fleeting, and he pitied his own love for its brief captivity in the fleeting sheeny skein of her error. He pitied and he loved: the banner-mobbed moment belonged to her youth, it would not come again, the sublime error of her upraised arm would never come again. The rasp of aberration sc.r.a.ped on his regret: Allegra dared, and he had never dared at all. She pulled down propriety: father, mother, right and rite. Her arm lifted like a spear, and her father's fury and her mother's pique, punis.h.i.+ng, forbade her the white dress of coming-out. William sorrowed for her, remembering his sisters' coming-out: the crest of the nubile hour. Lucky Helen, lucky Marie! Unlucky Allegra! She got herself (in retaliation) engaged to Vernon: it was the stamping of her foot. William looked on, ambushed by terror; but Vernon was too fat and too pedantic: he criticized the position of the commas and semicolons in her poems, so that she a.s.serted she would prefer to marry even William, who never criticized her at all. True, true, all bewilderingly true: William did not criticize her even now, though he despised her clubs and had no taste for the visitors who came an hour short of midnight without hats or coats or neckties, slouching and laughing and eating dripping fruit in the living room, where the hearthrug was a real polar bear, though dead. Some of them were midwesterners, unmannerly; worse, he suspected among them a Jew or two. Why had the signs and banners not vanished, like the young wife's jumpers, like the girls of Miss Jewett's? Why had they not melted away into the ache of an old mischance which one recalls with a perversity of yearning? The signs and banners of the mind: the alternative which is not really an alternative, the zealous error which is not zealously pursued, the playing at piracy by children-he was puzzled, puzzled. There was a queer knot in the young wife: the thread did not pull smoothly through, as it ought. She was clinging too long to resistance, too stubbornly tediously long to error; she was playing pirate in grown-up's clothes. Vaguely but patiently he wondered who was to blame, and saw again the bulbous pages swaying like fleshy blades under the water, turning in the water, diving and rising in the water-rings around her ankles. He had fallen asleep. She had thrown her Sh.e.l.ley in the water. He was wronged, he was innocent: he could not love and pity error unless it swam up refracted through the wave of an olden time: the way his sight quickened in spite of itself at a mediaeval spire, pin-thin at the top, though he knew it belonged to the Dark Ages of superst.i.tious faith and lacked the homely cleanliness of Bible-things. The long-ago existed for the sake of pity and love; one was young in order some day to forgive oneself for it. Willingly, wittingly, as an act of cheris.h.i.+ng, he forgave Allegra her parading years. But she did not forgive herself, she did not relinquish herself, she did not defy herself. She continued, she continued. Still he did not criticize; but fifteen holding companies inextricably entangled with one another intervened, and drew him away like Theseus in the cave, unraveling. The polar bear's head ran with pear juice, and afterward Allegra, poking at the last log of April, confronted him with p.r.o.ngs and defenses: "the subject," said she, "is bears," and laughed until he laughed too, and then said "forebears," and defended her dead mother against her dead father because her mother was right and her father was a fraud; and defended her dead father against her dead mother because love is not a cage; and defended the working cla.s.ses against the leisure cla.s.ses because the members of the meeting had proved their case; and said to the young husband (who longed to kiss her hair, close and valorous as a helmet in the log's glint), "Who do you think can go to museums? And on an island, an out-of-the-way place like that! They'll have to run a ferry, the train stops two towns away, he didn't think of that! And not even pensions for the kitchen people! And all for the sake of whales and things! What good is a whale to the workers? The workers don't go to museums! It's only a scheme to set up a capitalist monument to unreasonable profits, that's what the members said tonight; we talked it all out tonight. Who do you think can go to museums? It won't be the workers, it'll be the rich!"

And William's reply?

He took the poker from her and sat her on the polar bear (a peach-pit in its muzzle) and touched the slidings of her hair with a single courteous finger (how tentative, how jocose, his finger on the margins of her skull): "We," he said, "are the rich."

"I"-the young wife began mysteriously to weep (was it that she felt how he feared to strain beyond courtesy, she felt how tentative, how jocose, the finger of his hope?)-"am mankind," Allegra said. And meant to leap from him and stand; but she had called herself mankind, and him a capitalist, so he kept her down; he kept her down and would not permit her to break free. He oppressed her then, tasting salt in her eyes. "Allegra, Allegra," he said, exploring her name for consequence, for motion; and she turned, and for the first time gave him her face (always afterward he thought of its look then as gilt, bronze-poured, religious), and said, "I think I'm pregnant, William." Power held him holding her; he gave a shrug of ecstasy. She licked herself, her arms, like a long cat, licking tears: "I hate it, I hate it. It could be you, I think. It could be." Was she honest? Ought he to doubt her doubt? She mumbled, muttered, murmured, wept. "It could be," she said once more, licking, and fell away from him the way a petal falls when some rough hand has made the stem shudder: a hand, not the uncaring wind.

("She was mistaken," William bluntly announced twenty-five years later: to me in his office. "Luckily. Luckily. I thanked my stars and still do. It was not my ambiton to be the father of a child whose father I was not. I meant to rear my own. I thanked my stars.") But it was confession, revelation: she was not safe: he could not trust "Trust, trust," she moaned back at him (often they argued it), "what does the trust matter? I mean if you let it go just one summer? You take everything so seriously, William, just because it's written down. Everything's the Divine Word to you. And just one summer! There's nothing in it that says you have to start it right away, is there?"

The doc.u.ment lived in his mind, like all doc.u.ments. "As soon as feasible from the date of execution," he quoted; it was already halfway through May. She was asking for a single summer. "He meant to see it go up in his lifetime. We've already got an oceanographer coming to look things over," he objected, staring.

"But just this one summer! After all, the property's there, n.o.body's going to use it, and they all say it's ideal. The house for meetings, the nucleus group indoors, the overflow in tents in the woods-"

"Tents in the woods," William said. She was not safe, he could not trust, she was lost to him. He saw her bent over her notebook. It was the first version of Marianna Harlow. She no longer wrote those queer little poems that never rhymed: she told him that art without immediate relevance to society was wicked. What a moralist she was! He asked, "What's it about?" and put on his straw hat, though the band was too tight and pressed his brow and stained it with a red thong-mark.

"The revolution of the workers."

"Yes," he said. "And will he be here today?"

"Who?" But she knew.

"The one from Pittsburgh."

"He's not from Pittsburgh, he's from Chicago. I don't know, I can't telephone. The telephone company took out all the telephones this morning-I made them. I can't concentrate with all that racket I don't want anything ringing in my head but these voices: the sisters, the foreman, the workers. Wait till I read it to you, William!"

He waited, and went in a ferry up the Hudson to a reunion of graduates. He wandered across the quadrangle under ancient eaves in the greenyear time of the newest gra.s.s-tips and squandered his eyes on the horror of all those boys' faces grown rigid with maturity. In his clubs in the city he never saw how those same young men had brutally grown less young: but here the travesty of dark scooping line and dim steady frown shook him with the gloom-was this Henderson, was that Blackfield? What a secret cuckold time was! He walked and talked-but even their talk was different from the usual maundering of the clubs: here they all seemed conscious of the danger of making themselves out for fools, they talked almost innocently-and heard a speech from the new headmaster and left a promise for a check and came home again at dusk. The young wife sat as before.

"I've got as far as Chapter Three," she cried out. "All in one day! It's only a draft, though. -Was it all right up there?"

Thirstily she emptied the last of a bottle of milk while he watched. How white the milk was! He had never before noticed the density of its color: it was thick as the moon. "I shouldn't have gone-it was a bore. It's always a bore. Same thing as the last time. It's only to ask for money. They're going to build again." He was dizzy with too much fresh air. He said, "I saw Manning. They've just made him a major. He's balding. Imagine, he's almost bald, and he's a year younger than I am."

"Listen!" said Allegra, not listening.

She read what she had written. It was a long lying account. It was non-event, non-fact; it was even anti-fact. None of it had ever happened; it was grotesque. It was false, false, false. It was full of false principles. He thought of Henderson and Blackfield as they had looked nineteen years ago; he remembered them in their football uniforms. He remembered their teeth. "What's that Chicago man do?" he asked.

"A journalist"-but her answer was a hiss of rancor. Why, why? She was bitter. He had nothing to say about her chapters. He did not comprehend them. They were either absurd or insane. At best they were trivial. "You can't feel it, you can't identify. You hate what I think! You hate my mind," she charged him crossly.

"A journalist? Is that all? I thought he was a professional organizer. He gives that impression."

"Well, why not? He's Youth Leader."

"Youth Leader?" he repeated stupidly. (And Manning was already bald. And Henderson and Blackfield had daughters and sons. One of them was old enough to read Uncle Wiggily. Henderson said: "The old rabbit gentleman, if you want to know. That's who Uncle Wiggily is." And the others smiled down innocently at the brilliant gra.s.s. The tragically mutilated boys talked of their children: strange! It was not the spasm of vanity that p.r.i.c.ked William. He believed he had a duty to exacting time; it made him hate philosophy. "Have sons!" the ghost of Allegra's father called from out of the sea.) "He's a bit long in the tooth, that fellow, to see himself in that category," William protested.

"He's Youth Leader anyhow, it's his t.i.tle. Just like Manning's being a major."

She knew Manning. She had danced with him at his sisters' parties. "Manning, well," he said, "he earned his t.i.tle in rather a different species of organization."

"Rather a different," she was quick to mock. "Now he can train gun-fodder for the reactionary imperialists, can't he? Rather a different!"

The country-air, the lawn-air, the air in the shadows of the school-founder's statue: he had pocketed it all in his clothes. It had the fragrance of fresh milk in a density of whiteness. He closed his eyes and saw points of yellow dandelions; he saw a waterfall of milk, and an old rabbit gentleman wearing a hat. "The fellow influences you," he accused, "he mesmerizes you."

"Because he can do anything, I've told you, in a political way. He's a sort of genius."

"He has no background."

"You're always looking to put people in cla.s.ses!" she shot back.

"I don't put them there. It's where I find them."

"We think about a cla.s.sless society."-She screwed on the top of her pen.

William argued impotently, "You let him be your ventriloquist in fact," and discovered, in the moment of opening his sight to the absence of dandelions, that he was wis.h.i.+ng for a different life. Was it too late? was it too late? The barbarians were scarring her mind. O Allegra! He meant to have her back; he gestured at her closed notebook. "All mad ideas," he said. "Mad ideas attract you." But that was not the Way: the more he condemned, the stricter her scorn for him. "They won't last, these notions," he essayed.

"Nothing lasts," she answered speculatively. "That's the whole point in having a revolution-to see that nothing lasts."

"Is he planning a revolution? Is that it? He's going to overthrow the Government?"

"Who?"

"Your Youth Leader," he said: but with a secret daring danger in his caution.

"Well what do you think all the discussion is about?" she sneered. "Only naturally it's important to lay the ideological groundwork first. You just don't go out and start a revolution."

"Ah," William said. "He's not a mere hothead then."

"If you're going to be sarcastic-"

"No, no," he retreated, "I'm simply looking for information. You spoke of a camp. I believe it was a camp. -For what purpose?"

"I told you. To discuss ideology and things. To train for the future. They're talking about having a World Youth Rally-that's just an example of the kind of preparation we'd need. It would be all the races on earth congregated in one place."

"I see," William said. "You're not thinking of bringing all the races on earth down to your father's beach?"

"Oh William! Will you, will you? You'll let us have the estate then?" she crowed; he had given himself away. "Oh look, I don't mean for the Rally-the Rally's not till next year, and anyhow it's going to have a million people. It might be Moscow or it might be Stockholm, we haven't heard yet. But we're hoping for Moscow. It's the logical place to celebrate."

"Moscow," he repeated. "To celebrate what?"

"I don't know-I can't bear lawyer-questions. I guess peace and freedom, things like that. Revolutionary things. Because the world's changing!" She flew out of her chair. "All we want is the camp. Just for this one summer! There's no rush about that museum, it doesn't matter about that museum-it's a crank idea, that museum! Oh please, William. Just June and July and maybe August. Fix it up!"

"It can't be fixed,'" he said thoughtfully. "There's the trust."

"The trust, the trust!" She whirled around him, spitting words. "I hate that trust!"

"I hate your camp," he said.

"What do you mean?"

They stood a.s.sessing one another.

"I mean it's abhorrent to me. It should be abhorrent to you."

"It's what I want," she said stubbornly.

"It won't last. It will burn itself out."

"Not the Movement!"

"Your devotion to it."

"My devotion is to justice."

"For whom?" he asked calmly; he was in control now; it was very like an examination before trial; he felt the root of his confidence.

"For the downtrodden! For the workers!" she threw out.

"And what about justice for your father?" he inquired.

"Oh what's that?"-impatient: as though he were a fool.

"To fulfil his plan. Not to betray his wishes. Not to betray the trust."

"The trust again! A piece of paper! He was rich, now he's dead: they don't need justice, the rich and the dead. You see?" she said sourly, "That's just the difference between the capitalists and us. It's the workers we think of."

He was against argument-as much dispute with a cloud. But resignedly he said, "Then you don't think far enough. You don't think beyond sensationalism into sound economics." He finished: "The conversion of the estate will open jobs that never existed before."

"Jobs for fis.h.!.+" she scoffed.

"Jobs for men."

"Pie in the sky!"

"What an adept you are," he said tiredly.

"You're reneging. It's just that you don't want the camp."

"No," he agreed. "I don't want it."

"You don't want anything," she said acidly.

He looked at her. Her eyes s.h.i.+mmered like a pair of teacups.

He said, "Have the camp. Just as you wish."

But he felt her confusion. He felt her suspicion. "June and July and August?" she demanded.

"June and July and August," he a.s.sented.

"All the house and all the grounds? The beach too? The woods?"

"All," he p.r.o.nounced. "Just as you wish."

"You can really fix it?"

"I can ignore it. I can postpone beginning. I can wait," he said.

"Oh, if you wait for us to burn out you'll wait a long time!"

"Perhaps," he proposed, "you won't ignite at all."

"Pooh," she said. "People always catch fire at a camp, if it's enthusiasm you're talking about. It's because nowadays there are techniques. The Youth Leader knows them all. He can start anything from scratch."

"A firebrand," William said warily.

"Oh, an inflammatory, call him what you want, we don't care. It doesn't matter-just so long as there's progress. Call it sedition!-the main thing is having the camp.'

"I thought the main thing was peace and freedom."

"Well of course! But there's a different thing for each different condition. It's important to be practical and expedient as well as just idealistic," she gravely explained.

"I see," he took in. "Your Youth Leader is a clever man."