“When are you leaving?—right now?” It seemed to Laskell that there was a shadow of apprehension on Maxim’s face.
“No, I leave tomorrow morning.”
And there was no doubt that with this answer the shadow passed.
Laskell remembered that Maxim, on his last visit, had asked him to dismiss the Negro cleaning-woman. Now perhaps something should be done about Paine. For Maxim surely had another request to make. And all Laskell’s unhappiness at that refusal of his came back to him now and with it the hope that this time Maxim would ask something of him to which he would not have to say no. He did not know how to get rid of Paine so that Maxim could make his request. And he ought to introduce Maxim to Paine, but he did not know by what name to introduce him. He was helped out of this difficulty by Maxim himself, who turned to Paine and said, “My name is Maxim—Gifford Maxim,” and put out his large hand.
“How do you do, Mr. Maxwell,” said Paine. “My name is Paine. Isn’t that a dreadful name for a nurse?”
“Not Maxwell—Maxim, like the silencer,” Maxim said. “Yes, it’s a dreadful name for a nurse and I bet you live up to it too.”
This was wonderfully in Paine’s line and she grinned back at Maxim. She saw, as her remarks to Laskell later showed, right beyond the shabby clothes, the dirty shirt, and the heavy scarred face, to the pride of family that lay so incongruously beneath them, saw the courage and the violence, the lack of regard for ordinary notions, and she said to Laskell that evening, “That friend of yours, that Mr. Maxim, is a real gentleman.” Laskell snapped, “Oh, yes—a proper gentleman,” furious at them both. But she missed the point of that and she was not really of the class that would say “a proper gentleman.” “Yes, he is indeed,” she said and brooded with pleasure on her intuition of Maxim’s aristocracy. But Laskell by then had had his fill of Maxim and rather more than his fill, and would not discuss him with Paine.
If Maxim was using his real name and even insisting that Paine get it right, perhaps there was no need to get rid of the nurse. Yet to be safe, Laskell said, “Paine, do you think we could all have some ice cream? You’ll have some, Giff?”
“Yes, thanks, I’d like it,” Maxim said. “But why don’t I go for it? It’s terribly hot.”
“Just as hot for you as for me!” Paine said, peppery and friendly. “You stay here and talk to your friend.” And she added darkly, “He needs talking to.” She had the tone of a nursemaid who punishes her charge by turning her regard to the visiting little boy, the good little boy who really knows how to behave.
“It’s terribly hot,” said Maxim. “Probably the hottest July thirteenth on record. It is the thirteenth, isn’t it?”
“No, the twelfth,” said Laskell.
Maxim said to Paine, “Is it?” His manner with her was very bold and gentle. He was “establishing contact” as Laskell had seen him do. He was succeeding very well with Paine.
“I rather think you’re right,” said Paine. “The thirteenth.”
Laskell bitterly remembered how often the date had been mentioned between Paine and himself, for he was to leave tomorrow, the thirteenth.
“Have you a calendar or a newspaper?” Maxim said.
“It’s the twelfth,” said Laskell irritably.
Paine found a newspaper in the wastepaper basket. “It’s the twelfth,” she said, granting the point in a sporting way.
“I could have sworn it was the thirteenth as sure as my name is Gifford Maxim.”
But Paine faced up manfully to the error they had shared. “No, the twelfth,” she said.
Laskell felt a wave of boredom sweep over him as the date was settled and this dry little flirtation came to an end. Maxim had the look of a man who has accomplished something.
Paine went out for the ice cream. Laskell was left alone with Maxim, who took off his jacket. His shirt was nearly transparent with sweat. He sat down in the armchair opposite Laskell’s. He took a cigarette from the box on the low table between them, lit it and drew in the smoke deeply, as far as smoke would go. Then slowly, carefully, analytically, he let it out. Laskell laid his head back on his chair. He was suddenly very tired. The pressure from Maxim was enormous. He wished that Maxim would make his request without further preliminaries. He admitted that the indictment was a true bill. The benign accusation was made by what Maxim was and also, perhaps, by what he kept secret. What Maxim was, was centered in that great dreadful scar on his cheek, down from the cheekbone to the chin. It was said to have been made by a glancing blow from the steel shoe of a policeman’s horse, rearing in a crowd as such horses are taught to do.
Maxim looked mildly and patiently at Laskell. Then he looked over Laskell’s head and beyond it and asked his question. “Are you still a friend of Kermit Simpson?” he said. And not until the question had been asked did he let his patient gaze come to rest again on Laskell’s face.
It was strange—in these infrequent meetings between Laskell and Maxim there was always a period of questioning. Maxim seemed to be investigating certain lines of communication. Usually the questions were about people he no longer saw. He seemed to want to understand the connections that existed between them. He seemed, too, to want to learn something about Laskell’s life and state of being.
When Maxim asked his questions, he used a slow, gentle, but very direct manner. He might have been conducting an inquiry of a high official sort. Laskell never felt that he was a criminal in the inquiry, but a respectable and important person consenting to give information, although there was indeed the chance that one of his answers might strip him of respectability and importance, much to Maxim’s regret.
Laskell found that he answered Maxim’s questions as briefly as possible. He acknowledged the authority of the interrogation by guarding himself against it. At the same time, he tried to be very direct and truthful and was conscious of his directness and truthfulness, as if he were contending with the impulse to lie to Maxim.
“Are you close to Simpson?”
“What do you mean by close?”
Maxim looked tolerantly at Laskell, acknowledging Laskell’s privilege to attempt evasion. He said patiently, “Do you have any influence over him?”
“Influence? Why should I have influence over him?”
Kermit Simpson was one of the few really rich men Laskell knew well. And although he had answered, “Why should I have influence over him?” uttering the word influence with irony, he knew, now that he was in Maxim’s orbit, that it was a natural question to ask about someone’s relation to a very rich man: Do you have influence over him? It was especially the question to be asked if the rich man was, like Kermit Simpson, politically idealistic and the owner and editor of a rather sad liberal monthly.
“You see him, don’t you?” Maxim asked, still most patient. “On the whole, you see a good deal of him?” He was making a new start, back of the question Laskell preferred not to understand.
“Yes,” said Laskell in a neutral voice, yielding the point but not giving much weight to it. And then the impulse to be entirely honest when Maxim questioned him made him say, “I spend week ends with him now and then and we’ve gone fishing together.”
Maxim received this statement with a look of kind approval. He turned his head to see the creel and rod which lay together near the suitcases. His manner was more relaxed, was very relaxed, as he drew his conclusion. “Then you’re going up to stay with him?”
“No,” said Laskell. “I’m going up to Arthur Croom’s place.” And he decided to ask a question himself. “Have you seen the Crooms lately?” Maxim gave no sign of having heard.
“Could you get Kermit to take someone on?” Maxim said. “On The New Era, I mean.” The New Era was the monthly magazine that Kermit Simpson ran on what he called Jeffersonian principles.
“What do you mean, take someone on?”
“Give him a job.”
“It wouldn’t be a very good job.”
Maxim ignored this and Laskell felt foolish for havin
g said it. “Could you do that?” Maxim said.
“I don’t know. I’ve sent him friends who wanted to write—review books and that sort of thing. But of course an actual job is different.”
Maxim nodded understandingly. In these questionings there was always a moment when Laskell felt that he was hedging and knew that Maxim was aware of it. Maxim never accused him of hedging. He seemed to expect reservations and always let them be made, never fighting them. He really had no need to fight, because Laskell always felt how shameful the reservations were. For to Laskell, Maxim was never quite alone. Laskell saw him flanked by two great watching figures. They were abstracted and motionless, having the air that figures in a mural have, of being justified in the exclusive contemplation of their own existence and what they stand for. On one side of Maxim stood the figure of the huge, sad, stern morality of all the suffering and exploited men in the world, all of them, without distinction of color or creed. On the other side of Maxim stood the figure of power, noble, fierce, indomitable. Both figures appeared to Laskell’s mind as male but sexless. The face of the one was old and tragic, the face of the other was young and proud. Yet both had that brooding blind look that is given by men to the abstractions they admire, in the belief that a lack of personal being is the mark of all great and admirable things. Behind Maxim and his two great flanking figures were the infinite dim vistas of History, which was not the past but the future. The vistas were corridors, and every answer made by Laskell, every evasion or reservation he might attempt, was listened to not only by Maxim himself, whose great scar made its sardonic comment on everything that was false, but was listened to also by the two great figures of suffering and power, and every answer re-echoed down the everlasting corridors of History, identified as the answer of the one poor meaningless unit, John Laskell, who was so concerned with his own being, his own poor little unit of will. Reservation and evasion were impossible.
“Then,” Maxim said, summing up conclusively, “Kermit has listened to your advice before.”
As Maxim put it this way, so minimally, Laskell knew that Maxim understood how much influence he really did have over Kermit Simpson. Kermit was a man of sudden attachments and enthusiasms, and more than one person had reported to Laskell the admiration for his good sense that Kermit had expressed. Like many rich men, Kermit Simpson was always looking for a wise friend, a perfectly disinterested adviser. This year Laskell was the friend. Maxim, with his gift for picking up information, surely knew this.
“Good,” Maxim said. “That’s what I wanted to be sure of. If I asked you to recommend someone for a job, would you do it? And even put a little pressure on Kermit to get him to say yes?”
Here, then, was Maxim’s request. It was of course political, and if it was political, it was important.
The two great figures bent their gaze on Laskell, and the corridors of History were ready to reverberate with his answer—for they have great acoustical properties, these corridors, and echo every word, no matter how softly spoken. For some reason Maxim wished to place one of his people on Kermit Simpson’s Era. The New Era was a chucklehead of a magazine and the only thing that might give it any value at all, any place in the long historical vista, was for it to be used by Maxim.
Yet Laskell had always had a kind of affection for The New Era, exactly because it was so chuckleheaded, so simple and gentle in its liberal and humanitarian faith. If Maxim wanted to place one of his people on The New Era, it could be only with the idea of influencing the policy of the magazine, perhaps of getting control of it. Once that happened, it would of course no longer be really The New Era at all. But this did not seem to matter so very much—under Maxim’s eye, The New Era shrank in importance for Laskell. It appeared to him only as the means of a small favor that he could do for Maxim.
“You mean,” Laskell said, “that you want a job on The New Era for one of your people?” And then, because he had made up his mind to try to do what Maxim wanted, he felt that he had the right to ask, “What do you want that for?”
Maxim made a strange answer. “I have no people,” he said.
There was sternness in his voice and his eyes narrowed. But it was a foolish evasion and it weakened him with Laskell. To a frank and open Maxim much could be given easily, The New Era among other things. But an evasive Maxim was very different. It was often necessary to hide one’s Party affiliation, but Maxim’s had always been open and known. It was one of the important things about him. He did have “people”—he both gave orders and took them.
And now he said again, “I have no people.” And before Laskell could challenge the false statement, Maxim said, “And you are jumping to conclusions. Would you recommend me for a job?”
“You!”
Slowly Maxim took another cigarette from the box and lit it. He inhaled the smoke as if searching out with it depths of his being that could be reached in no other way. He shook out the match and then blew the smoke out of his lungs in a long desperate exhalation.
“Yes,” he said. “Me.”
He got up slowly and went over to the luggage. He picked up the creel by its strap and looked at it curiously as it dangled. He turned to regard Laskell with a still, hooded, waiting amusement.
Laskell understood this tactic of pacing the conversation slowly, all the pauses dictated by Maxim. It put things in Maxim’s hands. It was intended to give Laskell time to doubt and question himself. And Laskell had always submitted to this device, feeling obscurely that a man who had so much to do with the tempo of events had the right to dictate the tempo of conversation. But now he did not submit to it. It even made him a little angry. Maxim was standing there with his hooded gaze so full of the knowledge of motive. But for Laskell at this moment some of his great authority had diminished.
“Will you please tell me what you’re up to?” Laskell said. “Why do you want this job?”
Maxim said, “A man must live.”
It was no answer. Not only was it no answer but it was exactly the kind of thing Maxim could not say, not even if he said it in irony, as no doubt he had. It was another evasion. Maxim did not have to think about making a living, though of course his salary from the Party was ascetically small. Laskell sat tight, saying nothing, as able as Maxim to say nothing and to dictate the pauses.
And he won. He was frightened by his victory as Maxim said in a rush, “Look here. You’ve got to do this”—in those two phrases there was a personal, a merely personal, urgency. There was even, as Maxim threw out his big hand in a kind of appeal, a throwing away of all political and moral superiority, a dismissal of the two great mural figures that went about with him, a shutting up of the corridors of History.
“I want you to call Kermit Simpson. I want you to call him now.” Maxim pointed to the telephone beside Laskell’s chair. “I want you to remind him of my existence after all these years and tell him I’m all right. I want you to get him to publish an article, not a political article, a literary article. Here—I have it here.”
Maxim picked up his jacket and took from its inner pocket a folded manuscript, holding it out to Laskell as if it were proof of something. “I want him to publish it right away, in his next issue. And I want a job on his staff. I don’t care what the job is or what it pays. But this must be done right away.”
Laskell’s question came very quietly after the intensity of Maxim’s demand. “And what name will you sign?” he said.
“My own—my own name. That’s the point.”
Something is wrong here, Laskell thought. This was a strange Maxim, with a look in his eye and a note in his voice that he had never before thought possible. It was a personal look and a personal note. Maxim wanted something for himself. And as Laskell looked at him, he knew that what Maxim wanted was help, was safety.
“Look here,” Laskell said, “what are you up to?” He spoke sharply because he felt in himself something very like fear at this new aspect of Maxim that could want personal assistance.
“I’ve told yo
u what I’m up to,” Maxim said reasonably. “A man must live. I’m trying to live.”
His voice was sardonic but his eyes were not. He did not mean making a living. He meant not dying.
“In order to live,” Maxim said, “I have to exist. You’ve got to help me exist. Because I don’t exist now.”
It was like facing a man suddenly stripped, and it was more terrible than it should have been. It was Laskell himself who had always had to guard against what he might disclose to Maxim of the narrowness, the merely private character of his own motives, and now, for some reason, the roles were reversed—Maxim was the one charged with the personal motive. At no time could that reversal have been anything but disturbing, yet Laskell, in the midst of his unreasonable fear, knew that his disturbance was too great.
But although Maxim might have lost authority, he had not lost his skill. In his pacing back and forth he had come on the photograph of the Crooms that stood on one of the bookcases. He picked it up and said, “I hear there’s a good chance that Arthur Croom will go to Washington. This is a good picture of them.” He set the photograph back on the bookcase. “By the way,” he said, “speaking of photographs reminds me—”
He went to his jacket and felt in the inside pocket again. And Laskell went cold with anger as he knew what Maxim was going to produce.
“I was going through some old papers to destroy them and I came across this.” And Maxim held out the snapshot. Laskell’s heart hardened against Maxim as his premonition was shown to be foreknowledge. He did not take the photograph. Maxim put it on the low table.
Laskell remembered the occasion when Maxim had come into possession of the picture. He had come in one evening, unannounced, as his habit was. Elizabeth was there and she and Laskell were going over a batch of snapshots taken during a recent week end. Maxim had asked to see the photographs and had gone through them very intently and Laskell had felt that it was a stern yet benign inspection of their private life. And then, when Maxim had looked at all the pictures once, he had started through the little sheaf again and then held one up and said, “I want this one.” And when the demand had been met with confusion and the natural question, “Why?” he had answered with that disconcerting directness, perhaps intended to disconcert, and that long deep look of his, “Because you’re good.” It was really a very alarming thing to say and Elizabeth had frowned as if she were angry, as if it were not at all a compliment. But there had been nothing else for her to do except let the picture go.
The Middle of the Journey Page 17
