Laskell did not look at the snapshot where Maxim had laid it on the table. He said, “What do you mean, you don’t exist?” His mind was cold and clear, very firm now. He was very angry. Maxim wanted to confuse him with this recollection of the past. He wanted him to realize sharply, at closest quarters, that people really did die. It was a cheap, manipulating trick.
Maxim mashed out his cigarette in the ash tray. He did it slowly, thoughtfully. He said, “It’s been a year since you last saw me, isn’t that so, John?” He did not wait for an answer. “In that time no one has seen me. No one, that is, who could say he saw me. Or would say, if he could. There’s no record of a person called Gifford Maxim. No one could say that on a certain date I came to dinner. No one could even say that in a certain month he met me and stopped to have a drink with me. I could vanish like that”—and he made a gesture—“and no one would know that I’d been missing. I’ve been working underground, as they say.”
“As they say?”
“I vanished,” Maxim went on, not heeding the interruption. “And very skillfully. I ceased to exist. That was necessary for the job I was doing. And now I must exist again. Or I may vanish for good.”
But surely he looked existent enough as he sat there, a more than usually substantial man. His scar looked very real, a unique identification. He did not look like a man who could either cease to “exist” at will or vanish very easily. “A man who does not exist can be got rid of easily,” Maxim said.
“What do you mean, got rid of?”
“I mean,” Maxim said brutally, “killed.”
Laskell had known what he meant but he had to have the word. And now that he had it, he naturally did not believe it. Or rather, he believed it and did not believe it. In the same way he believed and did not believe that it was the police that threatened Maxim’s existence. It was the courage with which Maxim faced the danger of his work that gave him so much of his power. He staked his safety on his ideas. The scar was a token of how ready he was to do that. But he staked nothing now. He was frightened. He was not merely professionally aware of danger in the line of his duty—he was shaken and afraid. To Laskell it was quite terrible to see this, as if something solid were vaporizing before his eyes. He sought for common sense. He said, “You really mean the police would—”
“I don’t mean the police.” Maxim’s voice was level with what he did mean.
“Then what do you mean?” Laskell said fiercely. But he knew what Maxim meant, or almost knew. He had really known that Maxim did not mean the police. Maxim just looked at him, waiting for him to formulate the answer to his own question. There was a sly, an almost malicious smile on Maxim’s face.
“Who then?” Laskell said in bitter exasperation. “Who then? Tell me what you do mean.”
And Maxim answered him as he knew Maxim would answer. “Look,” Maxim said wearily. “I’m through with the whole business. Finished. Washed up. Kaput. I’ve broken. Now do you understand?”
Although the answer, when it came, was not unexpected, still the meaning of what Maxim had just said broke slowly over Laskell because it brought with it the hideous intention of Maxim’s earlier statements. “You!” Laskell said almost inaudibly. “You!” And as he said the pronoun twice, he heard how great was his incredulity and how much more than incredulity there was in his voice.
Maxim looked back at him, impassive under the surprise, the contempt, the revulsion. It was revulsion that Laskell was feeling, a deep physical disgust.
Laskell said curtly, “All right then—you’re through. But why all the melodrama?”
Maxim looked at Laskell a long time and then said, “Melodrama,” repeating the word neutrally and curiously, a new word he was learning in a foreign language. “Melodrama,” he said again. Then he said very politely, “My work was very special, you know. And secret. Special and secret. I’m supposed to go back to talk things over. The point is that I’m not going back. I’ve wanted perverse things in my time, but I still haven’t developed a yearning for the ocean bottom or for a pistol behind my ear.”
The room was suddenly very quiet. But from the street came the hot summer noise of children at play, passionate and irritable from the heat. They were the same children whom Laskell had heard calling to each other in his illness, their voices gay and far off, speaking tenderly of life, the background to his mood of rest and peace. Now the voices were ugly and protesting. They were all crying to someone to throw the ball here—“Throw it here. Here y’are. Hey! Here y’are!” And then there was a long concerted shout of disgust, and one voice cried in harsh, distinct denunciation, “You dumb cluck!” There was an enormous empty place in the world where Maxim and his ideas had once been.
He said, “Do you mean to say you believe that if you went back—?” He was surprised at how much force Maxim still had, for Maxim had already made him accept the idea of back, although it was one of the beliefs of decency that, for people of Maxim’s Party, or former Party, there was really no such geographical or political direction as back. People of liberal mind understood that the belief in Moscow’s domination of the Party in America had been created by the reactionary press, and they laughed at it. Yet Maxim spoke as if back were a simple fact and had made Laskell accept it.
At Laskell’s unfinished question, Maxim turned from the window. On his face was an expression of ultimate pity. It was the pity of a man who knows the worst for the man who hopes for the best. But Laskell met Maxim’s look with a pity as great—it was one thing for a man to abandon his loyalty to the cause he had lived for; it was quite another thing, and far sadder, for him to spread foul and melodramatic stories about it, such terrible stories as were contained in Maxim’s silent stare, in his talk of ocean bottoms and pistols behind the ear.
Then Maxim said with the air of saying his very last word, “John, get this into your head. Just let your mind take it in. I know it’s hard, but you’re a liberal—you’re supposed to keep your mind open to new ideas. What I’ve been working at has nothing to do with strikes or unions, nothing to do with voting or with relief funds or with publications. I’m not going to say what it was, but use your head. I was special.”
“Giff, you’re crazy!”
It was the kind of thing one friend says to another in the extremity of exasperation and it had friendliness in it. But having said it, Laskell found himself flushing, because it was so close to the literal truth. Gifford Maxim could not be insane—he who had been almost the embodiment of Reason in action. Yet he was not in his right mind. Otherwise he could not sit there so unmoved, talking about such things as if there were no possible doubt of them, as if there were nothing morally wrong with them, only something to be personally avoided, attributing these things to the very forces that made for the great future. It was a form of paranoia, the persecution-mania.
Yet Laskell, although he clung to this formulation, knew that it was only a formulation, not a belief. Or it was one of those things he believed and at the same time did not believe. So far as he believed in Maxim’s insanity, it expressed his full sense of the tragic bitterness of the world, the deep confusion of our times, that had distorted a life and a mind so fine as Maxim’s, despite all the great protection of Maxim’s ideas. So far as he believed Maxim was insane, he could pity Maxim and not condemn him. He held hard to his belief and felt it establish itself within him.
“When did you get your new view of things?” he asked.
“You mean what led me to the break?”
“Well, yes—” But that was not what Laskell had had in mind. He was ashamed that it was not. His first question should have been about doctrine and line. A truly political man would have asked just such a question, at this point or earlier. At my age, he said to himself, I should be politically mature enough. But what he had meant was, when had Maxim got the new conception of things that led him to assume this violence, to believe that he would be in danger of his life if he went, as he said, back, and even if he did not go back? In the large,
mature, practical view of things, the question about doctrine and line was the first one to be asked. But it was the other question that Laskell pressed. “When did you come to believe such things as that you’d be in danger—there?”
“And here,” said Maxim. “And here too. I’ve always known it.” His simplicity was unexpected. It threw into a very strange light the certainty and skill of the answers he had made to Laskell when Laskell had asked him to explain the Moscow trials and the rumors about the actions of the Party in Spain. Maxim shrugged. “I’ve always known it. It’s just that now I’m in it—me—myself.”
“You’ve always known it?” Laskell was not sure which word he wished to emphasize.
Maxim nodded. “Yes,” he said flatly. Then he said in modification, “Of course, not always, but ever since I’ve been in a position to really know things. And that’s been a long time.”
“Long enough so that you can now say that the things you told me were lies?”
“I wasn’t lying—I was defending a position.”
“It never made any difference to you before? It’s only when you yourself are in danger—or consider yourself in danger?”
“I was a professional,” said Maxim in a cold voice. “What mattered to me were results. I always knew what the means were. They are not delicate or charming. They are even brutal. Please understand that I never had any of the liberal illusions about that. I was not, as you are, interested in ideals. I was interested in results. As a revolutionary I was wholly professional. But now the results do not please me. The present results and the inevitable later results. It’s not what I bargained for.”
His voice became explanatorily simple, as if it were Laskell who was in trouble, not very serious trouble, just some intellectual perplexity. “It’s not a sudden view, it’s been forcing itself on me for some time. I’ve kept quiet—if you take the professional attitude about revolution, you don’t permit yourself the luxury of ideas. You give them up with a certain pleasure. Up to a point. But I reached that point. And passed it. And since I know the means, I don’t want any such means applied to me. As I said, I’ve wanted perverse things in my time, but not—”
Laskell broke in, “I can understand a change of heart or mind. But I can’t believe you when you talk of terrorism. I’ve known several people who have broken with the Party for one reason or another, and you know them too—”
“It isn’t only that I’ve changed my mind. I was special. I told you I was special. I am still special.”
“Yes, you’ve told me. ‘Special and secret.’ But I don’t know what that means. Do you want to tell me what it means?”
Maxim seemed to consider. “No,” he said at last.
“Was that business with the letters when you were last here—was that part of it?”
“Yes,” said Maxim casually. “Didn’t you know that then? Wasn’t that why you refused?”
“No. I don’t know why I refused.”
Maxim raised his expressive eyebrow. “You don’t? I think you’re wrong. You knew. Though perhaps you didn’t know that you knew.”
“No, I didn’t know.” But Maxim might be right. Perhaps there had been in Maxim’s manner some indication, unobserved but responded to, that suggested that this matter went beyond what Laskell was ready for, beyond what Maxim scornfully called ideals.
“I think you knew then,” said Maxim. “And that’s in part why I’m here.”
Maxim seemed to see the mistake he had made and sat perfectly still, a little pale. Laskell said, “You actually think that because I refused to receive those letters I have declared myself ready to help you now—now that you’ve turned? You’re fantastic!”
Maxim’s best tactic was not to say anything at all. He knew it and sat silent. Then Laskell said, “What made you come to me about those letters? If your business was so special and secret?”
“I had to ask someone. Someone in your position. If you said yes, well and good. If you said yes, I would have known I could trust you.”
“Thank you.”
Maxim was silent again, looking as if there were nothing more for him to say.
“Granting there is danger if you go back—though I do not grant it—what danger is there if you don’t go?”
“I’ve told you. I don’t exist. I was important. I knew a great deal. I still know it. Too much. And I don’t exist. Not as a—citizen.” He smiled at the idea of his being a citizen. “And if I don’t exist, something can happen to me. No one would know it, no one would report it. Someone must know of my existence. You know. And that nurse of yours, Paine, she knows now.”
So that was the point of that pointless conversation with Paine! It was not likely that Paine would forget that she had seen and talked with a Mr. Maxim on the twelfth of July.
“But that isn’t enough. I must have a continuous existence, an office I go to every day, so that it is perfectly clear that if one day I don’t appear, questions will be asked. I must be on record to be safe. I want my existence established on, say, the masthead of The New Era. The more I exist and the more I exist publicly, the safer I am. Now do you understand?”
Laskell said, “For God’s sake, Giff, put your mind to this. I know the people you’re talking about. You’ve introduced me to some of them yourself. I don’t accept all their ideas, but they’re ordinary people, some of them really just middle-class citizens with decent social ideas. Gentle people. They couldn’t do such a thing.”
“Those people wouldn’t do it,” Maxim said.
“They couldn’t even order it done.” It was astonishing how he could pick up Maxim’s malign implications. “They couldn’t—it’s not in them.”
“They wouldn’t have to. They would never know about it, the ones you know.”
“Who would then?”
“It would be done. There’s reason for its being done and it can still be done safely. Can be—until I get myself an existence.”
Maxim said it as if this time he had really said his last word. And it was the last word that he uttered, the word existence that he kept repeating, that decided Laskell to believe that Maxim was not in his right mind. He felt ashamed of himself for not having acted on his first perception of this, for allowing himself to be drawn into political argument with a demented man, for harassing a mentally ill man with the quibbles of reason. He smiled to Maxim and reached for the telephone.
“What are you doing?” Maxim cried, leaping from the chair and seizing Laskell’s wrist.
If anything was needed to show Laskell how deeply that powerful mind was enmeshed in its wild corrupt fantasy, it was this sudden start from the chair, the iron hold on his wrist, the suspicion that some treachery was about to be committed. Laskell said, “I’m calling Kermit Simpson.”
Maxim slowly sank back into his chair, looking ashamed of his fright.
There was no reason why Simpson should not be called into service. It was no longer a matter of politics, no longer a matter of making political use of Simpson’s dim little magazine. Kermit had a good heart. He liked to say that he was non-partisan in his liberalism. If Kermit knew the facts, he would be willing to help.
And then, with the phone in his hand, Laskell wondered what he meant by “help”—had he been caught in the net of Maxim’s fantasy? Did Maxim really need the help he demanded? Was Maxim actually in the danger he spoke of so wildly? But then Laskell understood what he was doing. He was quieting Maxim’s strange panic by finding for him some kind of anchor or base, something to hold on to. But he had never thought the day would come when he would take command of a situation that was beyond Maxim’s control.
There was no one in The New Era office except a secretary and Laskell could hear in her voice the lonely isolation of the secretary who keeps the office in summer during that profound lull when the poorest of intellectuals seems able to leave the city to its wide and echoing emptiness. And Laskell thought of his poor crazed Maxim, trying vainly to establish contact with his old friends in this emp
ty city, thought of what Maxim must have felt when he came in to find the bags packed for yet another departure.
“Kermit is up at his place near Westport,” he said when he had this information from the desolate secretary. “I’ll try him there.”
Maxim sat there with his reason all about him, except for the single rift that delusion made. It was perhaps but temporary, the result of some terrible emotional crisis. Kermit Simpson had a large soft heart and Maxim could surely be left in it.
He reached Kermit in Westport. Kermit was full of congratulations for Laskell’s recovery and all reminiscent pleasure at the mention of Maxim’s name. But at the proposal that he give Maxim a job on The New Era he checked and pulled up short. He had the idealistic rich man’s first response, the fear of being used. “There’s no money in the budget for the job,” he said. “You know I run The New Era on a budget.” He was very proud of that budget. “And besides,” he said, “he’s a pretty political character.” But it did not occur to Simpson to ask why so political a character should want a job on his magazine. He was a very innocent man.
“No,” said Laskell and glanced at Maxim, who sat unmoving, and then permitted himself a cruelty. “No, I wouldn’t say he’s a political character any more. Not in the way you mean.”
Maxim did not give even a flicker of response and Laskell’s heart smote him for having taken so easy an advantage of a corrupted man, a weakened mind. And that led him to say with great intensity of persuasion, “Kermit, I want you to see him, I want it very much.”
The Middle of the Journey Page 18
