The Middle of the Journey

by Lionel Trilling

  “Yes,” said Maxim.

  “He died in Spain,” Kermit explained to Arthur.

  “Yes,” said Maxim. “He died in Spain. And how he died.”

  Nancy looked Maxim straight in the eye. Her voice was very bright and dangerous as she said, “And how did he die?”

  Laskell said quickly, “I met him once. Tall, angular fellow, wasn’t he? I met him twice, as a matter of fact. Was he really a good poet?” He hoped this question might be enough to turn the line of the conversation. He did not think that this was the moment to say that he remembered talking twice to Theron Walker at some length and that he had been very engaged by the man’s bright religious earnestness for ten minutes and then bored by his inner confusion the rest of the time. He had somehow never heard that Walker had died in Spain. He was sorry about it.

  But Nancy was not to be checked. “How did he die in Spain?” she asked.

  Maxim looked at her a long time without answering. She met his look unflinchingly, waiting. At last Maxim felt that he had made it dramatic enough. He said casually, “He died by stepping on a nail, a rusty nail. There was no anti-tetanus serum and he died of lockjaw. In agony.”

  Nancy, who had been pushing with her whole political strength, no doubt felt almost physically cheated by meeting such an insufficient counter-force. She said helplessly, “You’re not telling the truth.”

  “You mean,” said Maxim, “you expected me to say he was shot by your friends, by my former Party.”

  “Well,” said Kermit, “I’ll bet this is Theron’s Aunt Julia.” Nothing save the need to say something had given him reason for an increased certainty. “She was very good to Theron and gave him money when he got into trouble with the family. He wrote the Aunt Julia poems to her. You know, ‘Aunt Julia on the Catarrh’ and the one about her dog, ‘The Pulia of Aunt Joodle.’ The dog,” Kermit explained, “was a poodle.”

  Nancy took the help this offered not only for the false step she had made with Maxim but also for what it might do for her pride in the matter of Eunice. For, naturally enough, it was one thing to be deprived of Eunice in favor of a dull local squiress and quite another to have to suffer for the benefit of the favorite aunt of a dead young American poet. An Aunt Joodle with a pet pulia was something different from an unseen Miss Walker, and she asked Kermit to tell her about the poem. “It’s very witty—I can’t quote any lines—but it gets quite serious. It describes the tricks the dog can do, and its daily life, and then it goes on to describe the descent of the dog from the days when it was wild and fierce and free and then became a working dog, a water-retriever, and finally the pet of an old lady. It becomes a religious poem. The idea is that the amusing, affectionate nature of the dog is Protestantism. Theron became a Catholic, you know.”

  Laskell had to control the impulse to burst into laughter. It was somehow too absurd. But Kermit’s exegesis did quiet things down. Kermit and Maxim left to do their shopping, and Laskell went with them.

  They had a sandwich in town and when the others had dropped him at the Folgers’ on their way home, Laskell walked to the church. It was the very handsome church he passed every day, but he had never been in it. The Bazaar, he knew, was to open at one o’clock. Some exaggerated estimate of things made the ladies of the Auxiliary choose this early time to set up their tables and lay out their accumulated stock. They may have dreamed that the reports of the Bazaar had traveled far and that visitors from many communities would come for the cakes and jellies and chili-sauce, the penwipers, potholders, clothespin-bags, handkerchief-cases, table-mats, and painted wooden bowls. Or perhaps it was because the ladies who had charge of preparing the chicken supper had to be here this early and the rest of the Auxiliary membership felt that they must not be outdone in diligence. At any rate, the Bazaar opened its doors at one, although the crowd would not come until four or five. They called it the crowd and spoke as if a cordon of the State constabulary would have to be thrown around the building. It was not merely their natural vanity that made them speak so but also the prospect of serving fifty or sixty chicken dinners, which indeed would make crowd enough for any Ladies’ Auxiliary.

  Laskell saw the children running in and out of the vestry-room doors of the church and went in. Many of the children were dressed in their good clothes and they gathered in corners to slide on the hardwood floor and to punch each other quietly. A few stayed close to their mothers, deriving status from such public importance as their mothers might have.

  At one end of the hall there were seven or eight deal tables which, as Laskell later learned, were always referred to as booths. Emily Caldwell sat at one of them, her own wooden bowls before her, four small and two large. In addition to the bowls she was in charge of other merchandise, two heavily embroidered guest-towels and a small pillow of blue silk. At Emily’s left sat a faded blond young woman whom Emily called Glenda and introduced as Mrs. Parks. The chief articles that Mrs. Parks had before her were small doilies tatted in intricate patterns. Laskell suddenly realized that he was on the point of becoming the possessor of one of Emily Caldwell’s bowls.

  “You’ve made six. I thought you were only going to make four,” he said, and observed that Mrs. Parks withdrew some of the brightness of her smile at this indication that he had been party to Emily’s creative plans.

  “Yes,” said Emily. She said it remotely. She assumed a look of gentle impassivity, a subtle tightening around the cheekbones intended to say that if he did show a knowledge of her plans, it was beyond her how he came by it and she did not admit it into notice. It was not a very clever maneuver against the quick eye of Glenda Parks. Then she smiled at him rather wanly and said, “I didn’t think I’d have time for so many, but I did.”

  She was shy. And Laskell was shy as he said, “I’d like to buy one, if I may.”

  “Well, of course—if you—” What if she was going to propose, she did not go on to say. There could be no reasonable condition. But no doubt she wanted to tell him that he must not feel, merely because of what had been between them, whatever that was, that he was obliged to buy. The artist did not wish to be mistaken for the woman, but the woman was looking at him with uncertain eyes as he picked up bowl after bowl and held them out from him to study the design of each. He studied the four small and two large bowls, their designs in high red and blue, red for curves and rounds, blue for angles and sharpnesses.

  “Very original, I call them,” said Mrs. Parks. Loyalty to the Bazaar, and dissent from Emily, and then again some ambiguous sense of solidarity with another woman were mixed in her voice. “Very unusual.”

  Still holding a bowl out at half an arm’s length, Laskell nodded gravely to Mrs. Parks. “Yes, they certainly are,” he said. He spoke in the neutral, unemphatic voice of the buyer of a work of art who so truly respects the object that he must speak of it with surprise, for it is a natural and inevitable phenomenon that has always existed in the nature of things.

  “So modernistic,” said Mrs. Parks, secure in the established tradition of her tatting patterns.

  “Yes, isn’t it?” said Laskell, as if that were a recommendation.

  What aspiration was contained in the unprincipled designs of these bowls he did not know. He could see the forms of Cubism as it had been picked up from the brushes of Parisians who had dropped it two decades before, picked up by men of small intellect and less passion. He could see in the angles the embodied talk about the machine age and the beauty of the functional which had always implied angles. There was arts-and-crafts and a touch of the folk and even of the peasant, the saving myth of hand work. There was the deep sullen modern mysticism of the abstract and nonrepresentational, here scarcely understood. Oh, it was so thoroughly not good, it was so bad and silly and derivative and yet somehow it contained so much that, though badly transmitted and ill understood, had been tried and fought for in confusion and pain and pride that it went to his heart through all the firm barriers of judgment and taste. Each of the designs was in bad taste and each,
with its red and blue and its unorganized swoops of angle and curve, was deeply depressing, precisely because it denied the sunny fleshly quality of the meeting by the river. Was she at all what these darkened unhappy designs implied—as well as the woman who at first sight had suggested an ancient goddess to him, as well as the woman who had been foolish and social and pretentious at the Crooms’, and as well as the woman on the river bank? And as well as the rather ordinary-seeming woman who sat here next to Mrs. Parks and not without something of Mrs. Parks’s pinched, wan quality? Emily seemed troubled and uneasy, as if frightened that he might say or do something that would betray their relationship.

  “I think I like this one best,” he said at last. He added, “Though it’s hard to choose.” He tacked on the addition because he remembered the shadow he had seen pass over the faces of artists when you select one picture from all that have been shown, for by making a choice you are rejecting all the rest. “How much is it?” he said.

  “Two dollars,” said Emily Caldwell. She was blushing. “I—I decided that was what they were really worth.”

  As Laskell gave her the two dollar bills, Mrs. Folger came up in her large competent apron. “I guess you’ve made the first sale, Emily. Don’t you think Emily’s bowls are very unusual? I call them quite original. Do you think so too, Mr. Laskell? That’s Mrs. Caldwell’s strong point, I always say—originality. Isn’t that so, Glenda?”

  “Oh, yes, originality.”

  Mrs. Folger had a strong tie with him and it was not quite easy for him to say with all the necessary crispness, “Yes—they are extremely talented.” But he said it crisply enough and the two women at once accepted this check of their subtle intention of making Emily Caldwell the object of their descriptive minds.

  The bowl having been paid for, Laskell said, “Will it be all right if I leave it here until this evening? Anyway, I think your whole collection should be seen together. But be sure not to forget which is mine. Here—” and he took up a pencil and pad that were lying on the table, perhaps for purposes of accounts, and wrote “Sold” on it. He laid the slip in the big bowl.

  Susan came over to them carrying in her arms her big book. “Will you hear my poem once more, Mother?” she said. Mrs. Parks smiled at the child and Mrs. Folger put her hand on her head and Laskell had the sense of how much danger Emily and Susan habitually lived in.

  “Is it for the entertainment, Susan?” said Mrs. Folger kindly. “The children,” she explained to Laskell, “are giving a few renditions after supper.”

  “Yes, it’s for the entertainment,” Susan said. “Do you want to hear me, Mother?”

  “Later, dear,” said Emily.

  It was obvious to Laskell that Susan was hinting a claim on him. There was a certain lack of innocence in her face which he could interpret. It reached him at once and it moved and flattered him greatly. He said, “I’ll hear your poem, Susan. Come into the corner where we won’t disturb anyone.”

  He felt in Mrs. Parks and Mrs. Folger the quick rising of curiosity.

  He led Susan to an unoccupied corner and opened the book and heard the poem. Her interpretation was much as it had been when he had first experienced it. If it had changed in any way it was to a greater elaboration of gesture. When she came to the final declaration, “I will not cease from mental strife,” she emphasized the not and she stamped her foot in that petulant insistence which he had told her was wrong. She looked at him stricken and abashed. She was about to begin the whole poem from the beginning when Laskell said, “Look, Susan, it’s not important that you do it the way I suggested. You do it your own way—it’s your way and you’re used to it.”

  For the whole method of recitation was so touchingly absurd, with its reaching and grasping of the objects mentioned in the poem, its extravagant descriptive gestures, that there was no point in putting the child under strain for this one small matter of emphasis. But now she set as much store by it as by anything else in her delivery. “If it’s right, it’s right,” she said, “and I must get it right.”

  And stubbornly she went over and over the verse until she got it right.

  When at last she felt secure of its impress on her memory, she said comfortably to Laskell, “Now will you take me up to the trailer?”

  She had not in the least forgotten her invitation to tea and there was nothing for Laskell to do, since he had issued the invitation, except to offer to escort her. He had forgotten it, but Kermit, it turned out, had not. The tea was his reason for having bought the two boxes of chocolate Mallomar biscuits, rightly guessing that any child would know that hospitality was represented by free license to destroy as many of these marshmallow mosques as she chose. Susan sat and drank cambric tea with the three men, having first made the tea. She called it, as Kermit did, cambric tea, and it made Laskell think of the strange confusion of the child’s background, for no one any longer spoke of cambric tea except from the memory of a very sheltered and genteel childhood. She protested the cambric quality of the tea on which the men insisted. She herself poured for them, doing it very well, and she would have given herself an adult cup if they had not all commanded, with a superstitious fear of what undiluted tea would do to a child’s nervous system, that she add the large quantity of milk. She was much interested by the arrangement of the trailer and had worked all the gadgets, but she was even more interested in her two hosts. She naturally inquired about their professions and was much gratified to be told that Kermit Simpson was an editor and Gifford Maxim a writer. She devoured more chocolate Mallomars than it seemed likely she could hold and beamed at the men.

  At five o’clock the crowd back at the church was at its thickest. At six the chicken dinner was served. At six-thirty Mrs. Parks sighed and said, “Those Romans!” It quite startled Laskell, who sat across the table from her. Maxim and Kermit, Nancy and Arthur, had all arrived in time for the supper too. But Laskell, alone of them, was listening to Mrs. Parks. He looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to complete or explain her remark. But Mrs. Parks wanted a larger audience. “Those Romans,” she said again, “they certainly had the right idea.”

  She lolled her head about in a gentle, abandoned, stupefied way. From the lolling of her head Laskell understood that she referred to the Roman conduct of a banquet. But he could not tell which of two possible Roman customs she had in mind. The bowls of sweet corn and of chicken stewed with dumplings had been eaten and removed. The great cakes had been demolished. The pitchers of milk and the pots of coffee were emptied. They had all eaten a great deal and Mrs. Parks may have wanted to say that she was so exhausted from eating that she understood the Roman habit of banqueting on couches, or she may have meant that she was so stuffed that she understood the Roman use of the vomitorium.

  No one was giving her the opportunity to develop her erudition and so she said in a louder voice with a faded blond insistence, “You certainly have to hand it to the Romans—they had the right idea.”

  On this attempt she got the audience she wanted. She had addressed her remark to the Croom party in general. Nancy smiled vaguely but responsively. Kermit suspended a conversation he was having with Emily Caldwell over the head of Susan, who sat between them. Kermit smiled to Mrs. Parks and Arthur smiled and Laskell smiled. Maxim looked rather blankly at Mrs. Parks, for his thoughts had been engaged in what he was saying to Mr. Gurney, the minister, who sat at the head of the table.

  It was Mr. Gurney who took up the remark and gave it the response that was wanted. He was closer than the others to Quo Vadis?, the great rural source of ancient history. “I know just how you feel,” he said, and patted the stomach which he distended for the purpose. “I know just how you feel,” he said again after two or three demonstrative pats which bridged the ages and, for a genial moment, made Mr. Gurney a Roman banqueter.

  And Mr. Gurney was no doubt very glad to have Mrs. Parks to respond to, for Gifford Maxim had just said to him, “In short, you do not believe in God.”

  Maxim had not said it in a
n approving way, nor in a scolding way either, but quite naturally. He had simply come to a conclusion after the facts were in.

  The minister was a pleasant-looking man in his fifties. He was impressively gray-haired, in manner both scholarly and rustic. His profession had left its mark on him, for he had a practiced expression of benevolence and tolerance which gave him a look of venality. He was surely not a venal man, anything but a hypocrite, but simply one of those people who make conscious to themselves an aspect of their characters of which they approve and which they try to act out. Mr. Gurney was really benevolent and tolerant but he had made the mistake of trying to appear so. At least it was a mistake from the point of view of the people from New York, none of whom was favorably impressed by Mr. Gurney. And Mr. Gurney had some perception of this and was doing his best to put himself right with these notable visitors. He quite naturally wanted to be at one with these people of the modern world. They were people of words and books and advanced ideas. Mrs. Folger, who was in charge of the seating arrangements, had put him at the head of this distinguished table. It was Kermit who had added Susan and Emily to the group—he felt under a clear obligation to Emily, for he had bought three of her painted wooden bowls, one for himself, one for Nancy and Arthur, and one for Maxim, and when Kermit bought from an artist he was always very careful to establish a friendly relationship which would make it impossible for the artist to feel patronized. Mrs. Folger had then brought Glenda Parks to the table, and Glenda had just confirmed Mrs. Folger’s estimate of her intellectual right to be there by the remark in praise of the Romans. The other five people at the table were all simpler folk who had taken their places when Mr. Gurney, seeing them looking for seats, had called them over and waved them genially into the distinguished company.

  Mr. Gurney had hoped that these intelligent city people would understand him in his true character—that is, as an ordinary man but a good one, who had the welfare of his flock at heart. In speaking to them he had not used the word flock, and when he spoke of welfare he emphasized its social and material aspects. Nowadays, he knew, advanced people identified the good with social effort, and it was a great relief to Mr. Gurney to know this. He began by asking Nancy, who sat on his right, if she had done much canning this summer. He had then boasted that he himself had canned thirty jars of tomatoes. Nancy had responded most cordially to this. She said, “Imagine! Thirty jars!” Then Mr. Gurney talked to Arthur about farm legislation. He spoke with a comfortable unhappiness about the reactionary element in the country districts. He said that the ministers of his church were considerably more liberal than the lay membership. Encouraged by Arthur’s interest, he said that he was not an extremist, but that he was sympathetic to what he called The Great Experiment that was going on over One-Sixth of the Earth’s Surface.