“Then you don’t have so much money left and that keeps you from losing your—inspiration?” Susan directed the question to her mother to see if she had used the right word.
“Of course, it doesn’t make so much difference with me whether or not I have money,” Laskell said to get himself out of his false position. “Perhaps it’s more important for poets and other creative writers. But you see, when I do write, I’m just a critic of other people’s work.”
This, he thought, would perhaps save both the fact and the myth, but there was Susan staring at him with frightened, almost horrified eyes.
“Susan thinks she’d like to be a writer,” Emily Caldwell said.
“Or maybe a painter,” Susan said, modifying almost mechanically, for she was not thinking about her future. And with a great effort, steeling herself, she confronted Laskell. “Are you really a critic? Mother says critics make life miserable for people.”
Laskell saw what he had done and how far the myth had gone. He saw the old romantic regimen of the artistic life, the starvation in the garret, the pawned overcoat, the pure flame of the ideal which, everlastingly tended, kept the poet somehow warm, the gay loves and generous comradeships, the shared stews and the simple wine of the people, the grim implacable critic whose word was law and fame and fortune, that word spoken for some lucky and deserving few, the unselfish joy of friends and then the danger, the terrible danger of success, of satisfaction, of loss of inspiration, and then the question: who were the truly fortunate ones, the truly successful ones—those who had reached fortune, or those who had been kept in the old, deprived life?
It was a touching and generous dream, and it occurred to Laskell how much of the desire to be an “artist” was not so much the wish to do a particular kind of thing, but rather the desire to be a particular kind of person, to live a life of sentience and morality. It was one of the disciplines of virtue, like chivalry or courtly love or religion.
But he had to make haste to set himself right with Susan. “I’m not that kind of critic, Susan,” he said. “Mostly I write about technical books. And when I write about art it’s about the art of people who are dead.”
This seemed to Susan a sufficiently benign function and she relented.
Emily Caldwell said, “Yes, Susan wants to be a writer. But first she’s going to college. Aren’t you, Susan?”
“Yes, to Vassar or to Smith’s.”
“Smith, dear.”
“Smith.”
“If she can get a scholarship. Some day I must speak to Mr. Croom—Professor Croom, I suppose I should say.”
“I think maybe I’ll be a dancer,” Susan said.
“Indeed? Isn’t that a new idea?”
“Yes. But I think I would like to be one—a dancer.”
“Well, perhaps,” said Emily. She said it with a kind of stiffness and a shadow passed over her face. Laskell wondered why dancing—or the dance, as she would no doubt call it—should seem to Emily Caldwell so much less noble than the other arts.
“Professor Croom is quite an influential man, I suppose,” Emily Caldwell said.
But her voice was not simple and frank, it had plans in it, and Laskell said coolly, “Oh, more or less.”
The subject was not pursued. Laskell rose to go.
“May I walk with you?” Susan said. “Just part of the way?” And having asked the question of Laskell, she looked doubtfully at her mother.
Emily Caldwell neither gave permission nor withheld it. Laskell could not keep down the absurd pride at having his company claimed by a child, one who, as it appeared, expected him to walk with her hand in hand, for she put her hand in his.
They were nearly at the road when Susan’s mother caught up with them. “Please be careful not to walk too fast—the hill is very steep.”
It presumed on a very short and not wholly satisfactory acquaintance and Laskell said brusquely, “I’m really quite well now.”
“Oh!” said Emily Caldwell. “Oh, yes!” She was much confused, and Laskell was sorry for the sharp way he had answered. For, after all, her caution could only have been friendly.
4
MRS. FOLGER took the fourth cup-and-saucer from the china-closet and placed it carefully on the table before Laskell, having first turned over the cup to look at its bottom. No collector who haunted the little shops for Meissen or Royal Dresden could have handled the cup with more awareness of its charm. It was English and of the eighteenth century, as were all the other three. It was the most beautiful of the four and therefore kept for the last. Of a fine, soft white with a floral pattern of intense green, it was wide and low-slung, quite perfect in its shape.
“I suppose they had sets of them and used them for everyday,” Mrs. Folger said. “Imagine! And all I have left is one of each. And this plate.”
She reached into the closet for the plate. Because Laskell was still admiring the cups she did not intrude it on his notice but sat down and kept it out of sight until he should have done.
All the cups were now before them on the table and they looked at them together in a community of respect.
“This one is cute, without any handle at all,” Mrs. Folger said, and she touched the rim of a very small cup, octagonal in shape and made without a handle in imitation of a Chinese cup.
“That’s the way the Chinese made their cups—without a handle at all,” Laskell said.
Mrs. Folger did not particularly notice this piece of information.
The cups sat there with their air of having temperaments and minds of their own, each one not merely with its own shape but even with its own expression. They were not at all passive but looked back at their observers.
“Yes, that one is very nice, but I think I like this one even better,” Laskell said, and pointed to the last of the cups.
They sat for a few moments in admiration. It was true that Mrs. Folger wanted an ugly new house and that she interrupted him ruthlessly when he listened to music. But over the teacups they were quite at one. How much, Laskell thought, I am involved these days with women and their housekeeping prides!
“They are the only old things I have, that have come down to me,” Mrs. Folger said modestly, “except this,” and she put the plate down before Laskell.
It was a scalloped plate, with a small gray vignette islanded in a sea of dimmed white, a heavyish ware, not delicate. The vignette was of a solitary man musing in a rural scene. It was clear that he was musing—one knew from the position of his walking stick, which he held behind him. There was an elm and a church, and there was a stream with a small bridge. The man was short and stocky, and he was plainly dressed, with a broad hat, as befits one who pauses to muse. He was no doubt a Solitary Traveller who had come home to his native place, and the representation of him was pleasantly funny, he was so solemn and self-conscious, yet he was so much part of the time in which he had been conceived and executed that he had all the elegiac dignity that his artist could ever have wished for. Time had given the work what the artist himself could not. The little man on the plate, standing there with his thoughts, his musings, his meditations—they were surely meditations on the Transitoriness of Human Life or on the Ruins of Empire or some such admired subject of his period—was a very solid little figure of a man, his small personality both compact and free.
“It’s very nice,” said Laskell.
“But I think the cups are nicer,” said Mrs. Folger.
Laskell looked again at the cups. Sitting with Mrs. Folger over her precious pieces of china, taking pleasure in the objects and seeing life in them, Laskell was happy in the mild relationship with this worn, elderly woman who was so far removed from his usual existence. As he sat in the dim, damp dining-room he had a strong emotion about the life in objects, the shapes that people make and admire, the life in the pauses in activity in which nothing is said but in which the commonplace speaks out with a mild, reassuring force.
There was now nothing more to say about the cups and the plate. He s
aid, “What sort of man is Duck Caldwell?”
It was only after he had spoken that he realized that the eighteenth century had worked upon him precisely the effect it had chosen as its own—he was trying to turn reason and common sense upon the one thing now in his mind that was extravagant and merely personal. Nancy and Arthur saw Duck Caldwell as a high manifestation of ordinary life and as such he gave them a moral pleasure, much as the teacups and plate gave Laskell pleasure. But Laskell saw Duck as not at all part of the daily normality and took not the slightest pleasure in him. It was absurd that he should have any opinion of Duck, for he had never spoken to the man. Yet he not only had an opinion, but a very intense one—try though he did to invalidate it. He believed that he had subtracted all feeling against Duck for not having met the train. What had happened on the Crannock station platform was not really Duck’s fault. All that Duck could be responsible for was the fretful impatience that another guest of the Crooms might have had if he had been left to stand on the platform when he expected to be met, or that Laskell himself might have had at some other time. Duck could be blamed only for having caused inconvenience; Laskell alone was responsible for the terror. And as, with the passing of time, the memory of that meaningless terror became less and less sharp, became nothing more than a rather abstract recollection of pain and the judgment that it was the worst experience he or any man could have, Laskell could more easily suppose that in his opinion of Duck the incident at the station had no part at all. Yet he not only disliked Duck but feared him.
He had not yet met Duck face to face, and had had only glimpses of him at work at the Crooms’ or leaving his work and coming now and then to borrow the Crooms’ car. Possibly he was responding not to the person himself but only to the amount the Crooms talked about him. Sometimes it seemed to Laskell that Duck was an almost obsessive subject of conversation at his friends’. As he listened to what the Crooms said about Caldwell, he would come to think that his own quick contrary feelings, really based on no knowledge of the man, must be some last vestige of his illness. The Crooms talked about Duck incessantly. Laskell, on this score, even asked himself if he was jealous. After all, the Crooms who talked so happily about Duck were the same Crooms who so firmly refused to talk about a certain matter which he had several times offered them. It was not unnatural that Laskell should wonder if an opposition were not being set up between Duck and himself. It seemed the more likely when Laskell understood that Nancy and Arthur talked about Duck as if he were not so much a man as a symbol. He was a symbol of something good, of something that deserved to be talked about endlessly; and if that were so, then Laskell might suppose that he himself, whenever the Crooms had jibbed at talking about his illness and closeness to death, was to them a representation of something bad.
What Laskell saw in Duck, or conceived of him, was so at variance with what Nancy and Arthur saw that sometimes the difference angered and alienated him. The Crooms admired in Duck a quality which they referred to in various ways, but most often as the thing they called Duck’s reality. Duck’s skill with his hands, which was undoubted, the depths of his roots in the district, a gift of racy speech he was said to have, his poverty, his resistance to the claims of domesticity, his outspokenness about these claims and his rejection of his wife’s vague gentilities—all these traits seemed, in the eyes of the Crooms, to contribute to Duck’s quality of reality. Even when the Crooms themselves were put to inconvenience by Duck’s dislike of work and of keeping engagements most solemnly made, even when the progress of their beloved house was delayed by Duck’s failure to show up, they were ready to set aside their disappointment in deference to Duck’s independence. “He has,” Arthur said, “his own way of doing things and he can’t be hurried.” It was a characteristic which Duck shared with reality itself.
And yet, Laskell could not help reflecting, the Crooms wanted to hurry other manifestations of reality. If they laid claim to having any work in the world, they would have said it was exactly the expediting of reality. They were not quite so committed to haste as Maxim once had been, but they were committed enough. They would have liked to hurry the reality of class into understanding and the reality of the better future into being. Why, Laskell wondered, was the reality of Duck exempt from the general hurry? Why should he alone, of all things, be allowed to move at his own pace? Was it because Duck represented to the Crooms some final goal toward which all realities were driving? There was something in their voices as they spoke of Duck that made this conceivable, but it was of course a foolish speculation. For the final reality that the Crooms wanted was one of application and hard work and responsibility. And all they reported of Duck, apart from his manual skill, suggested only anarchy and evasion.
One thing about his own extreme opinion of Duck disturbed Laskell especially. He did not like its extravagance—for it was far too extravagant to think of Duck as wicked and even “evil.” Nor did he like its putting him at odds with the Crooms. But most of all he did not like a connection he somehow made between his disapproval of Duck and his visit from Gifford Maxim. He could not have put into words the reason why Maxim’s lies about the Party should so have conditioned his attitude toward a man who had never knowingly done him harm and who clearly had nothing to do with politics and parties. As much as anything else, it was to drive the effect of Maxim’s story out of his mental system that he had asked Mrs. Folger for her view of Duck. Her view was bound to be normal; it would supply a simple corrective to his own extravagance.
“His grandfather, now,” said Mrs. Folger. “I remember his grandfather very well from when I was a little girl, driving around in his buggy. The family’s been in these parts since Lord-knows-when. And the grandfather, old Senator Caldwell, he was in the legislature, a lawyer. He lived on the fat of the land, the old Senator did. Yes indeed, the fat of the land. He had that big place that’s now Miss Walker’s. But the father, now, he speculated, and Duck, he drinks, not that he drinks much, but a little of the strong stuff goes a long way with him ...”
So round and round went the wheels. Duck, said Mrs. Folger, was bad enough, shiftless and pretty lazy, often drunk, a good deal of a liar—but even as she spoke the words of moral judgment, her tone and indeed her whole manner created a large aura of exemption around him. She viewed Duck’s lapses from absolute grace, it occurred to Laskell, much as Paine would have viewed the real Maxim, had Laskell told her about him. Certainly it was clear that Mrs. Folger thought Duck the more interesting because of his notable ancestry, and his fall, or his father’s fall, from a high place.
There was relief for Laskell in this opinion. Mrs. Folger lived so fully in the life of the world—with Miss Walker and the little duchy in view it was almost the life of the court—that her opinion came to Laskell with authority. The Crooms might be misled by their generous idealism. But not Mrs. Folger. She saw the world and the way it went, she knew about vanity and about love, she knew something of their price. This was clear from the conversations with Miss Walker that Laskell overheard. Mrs. Folger was not, like Nancy, involved with ideals, and to Mrs. Folger Duck was not what he was to Nancy, the victim of a general injustice, the embodiment of a reality that one might not ignore. Nor was Duck to Mrs. Folger what he had, up to now, seemed to Laskell—the agent of some undefined evil. In the normality of Mrs. Folger’s view, he was simply a man, with a man’s errors and virtues, and a man—what was more—of a rather engaging, if not entirely admirable, sort.
Mr. Folger came in while Mrs. Folger was talking about Duck. He stood silent, listening. He seemed, without saying anything, not to concur in his wife’s opinion. But then he was possibly only registering a masculine protest against Mrs. Folger’s ever-so-vague appreciation of some special sexual gift of Duck’s. Perhaps unknown to herself, Mrs. Folger saw Duck as having a saving touch of the satyr.
Between Mrs. Folger and her husband an attitude came down the ages, fresh and pure from the distance it had blown, almost fragrant with its simplicity and its long hist
ory. Montaigne’s neighbors had talked so; Pascal had overheard such views in the salons of Paris. And back beyond, in Rome and before that in Sumer, men and women had judged each other as the Folgers judged Duck Caldwell. They had their little gossip and went about their business.
Mr. Folger said, “I’m driving to town.”
He looked at a point on the wall about ten degrees to the right of Laskell’s head. That angle of indirection, as Laskell now knew, meant that Mr. Folger was addressing him. He understood that this declarative sentence was by way of being an invitation.
He hesitated, not knowing whether he ought to accept the invitation at this stage or wait to see if it developed further. Mr. Folger turned his large impassive head and let his eyes rest on the wall, this time about ten degrees to the left of Laskell’s head. There was a look of patience on his face. His eyebrows were ever so slightly lifted. Laskell knew that the invitation was now fully offered. “I’d be glad to go if you could take me with you,” he said.
Mr. Folger got up, having received his answer. “Sitting all day in the same place never did any man any good,” he said, as if he were giving himself and Laskell a reason why one should not think Laskell’s statement unreasonable. He frowned reflectively at the spot on the wall.
They drove in the big old car which, as Laskell had learned, was not Miss Walker’s but had been bought by Miss Walker for Mr. Folger. Driving, Mr. Folger did not have to find new places from which to ricochet his communications. He simply kept his eyes hard on the road.
“Big tract over there cleared of tent-caterpillar by those CCC boys. They fed with us while they were in the district,” he said, lifting his head high to inspect the road.
They passed an orchard that was sad and scant. Mr. Folger said, “Gypsy moth,” and raised his shoulders to see what might have happened to the asphalt ahead of them.
The Middle of the Journey Page 14
