“The Research Magnificent, I call it,” he said, turning to Maxim on his left. “Do you know that book by H.G. Wells?”
And when Maxim nodded economically, Mr. Gurney went on to say that in some ways religion could be said to be an effort for social justice. He said that it was significant that Jesus Christ had been a carpenter and his apostles of a similarly proletarian origin. “I looked up that word,” he said. He was an honest man and he did not pretend to a classical education he did not have. “I looked it up once and it comes from a Latin word, proles, which means children. ‘Suffer little children to come unto me!’” He looked significantly at his listeners and nodded the point home conclusively.
Everything about Mr. Gurney was clear—that he was not learned, that he was not intelligent, that he was decent. Equally clear was his desire to be approved of. All this did not make him very attractive, but Arthur and Nancy listened seriously and nodded in agreement. But the large, strange, and rather forbidding Maxim was listening even more seriously and quite without nodding. Maxim said, “In short, you do not believe in God.”
It was at this appropriate moment that Mr. Gurney heard Mrs. Parks’s statement about the good sense of the ancient Romans. But even after Mr. Gurney had expressed agreement with Mrs. Parks by patting his stomach, Maxim went on with his conclusion. “In short, sir,” he said respectfully but sternly, “in short, you believe in society and social justice and sociology, but you do not believe in God.”
Mr. Gurney was taken aback. But he recovered himself. He leaned attentively toward Maxim and smiled. “I’m sorry,” he said quite urbanely, “I didn’t catch the name.”
“God,” said Maxim with brutal simplicity.
The minister first smiled in embarrassment but then he said with sufficient dignity, “Your name, I mean.”
“It’s Maxim,” said Maxim.
Now Mr. Gurney was wholly confused. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “I’m afraid I don’t follow. What is a maxim?”
“My name—my name is Maxim, Gifford Maxim.” He said it with the real intention of being clear. “I’m sorry if I may have sounded offensive. I didn’t mean to.”
“No offense where none is taken,” said Mr. Gurney. He then turned to the question. It must have been very confusing for him, for it had long been part of his view of the world that intelligent people were sure to be atheistic or agnostic and, if they spoke about God at all, were likely to attack even so complicated and modified a belief as Mr. Gurney him-self held. This was Mr. Gurney’s first encounter with an intelligent man who seemed to blame him for not believing in God. “It depends,” Mr. Gurney said, “on what you mean by God, Mr. Maxim. If you mean a Being who may be understood as some divine purpose in the world, or some principle that is at bottom good—”
“Suppose we say that God is the Being to whom things are rendered that are not rendered to Caesar.”
The minister looked terribly guilty, as if he had just been caught rendering something to Caesar that he should have turned over to another party, the legal owner. He no doubt looked the guiltier because he was so very poor and because he had long prided himself on the self-denial of his life. But then he said jovially, “A very good definition, Mr. Maxim. I’m very glad we agree.”
“Do we agree?” said Maxim.
Laskell was startled by the far-off, stubborn expression that Maxim wore. He wondered if Maxim was really going to draw this poor, tiresome man into a theological argument. He was very glad when just then Mr. Gurney’s attention seemed to be decisively claimed by something at the other end of the hall; the minister laid a hand in a confiding and friendly way on Maxim’s arm. “I’d like to go on with our discussion some time. I’m sure I would have much to learn. Very stimulating.” Mr. Gurney hurried away.
Mr. Folger had entered, following in the train of a lady who could be no other than Miss Walker. It was Mr. Folger’s attitude that gave Miss Walker her consequence and almost her appearance, for she was only a little package of an elderly maiden lady, dowdy and graceless, but Mr. Folger’s large, grave, authoritative air as he walked by her side gave her the right to be whatever she chose. Mr. Folger walked silently, a quarter-step behind her, his large face holding its irony in reserve. He looked like a minister of state in an illustration by Thackeray. He actually carried nothing, but he had the appearance of a man with a portfolio.
Mr. Gurney and Mrs. Folger converged upon the entering pair and so did the gaze of all the replete diners at all the five trestle-tables. But then, with a unanimity of quiet politeness, all eyes were turned back to the coffee cups. Miss Walker was led to a corner and comfortably bestowed there.
“That’s Miss Walker,” said Mrs. Parks. “She has the big place down the road. She takes a lot of interest—in the church, I mean. She had it all renovated two years ago, and painted.”
They all gazed at Miss Walker sitting in her state, and Kermit got up from his chair to look. “Why, it is Aunt Julia, of course it is. I must go over and say hello.” And he started off and then came back. “All of you come, I’d like you to meet her.”
Nancy said, “Not now, Kermit. Some other time.”
“No, come now. You’ll like her, everyone likes Aunt Julia.”
“Mother!” said Susan in excitement. “Mother!”
Emily’s “Yes, dear” was intended not to encourage Susan to ask the question she was bursting with but to signal that she could consider the question both asked and answered. But Susan was not being sensitive to signals. She said, “He called her Aunt Julia. Mr. Simpson called Cousin Julia Walker Aunt Julia.”
“Yes, dear.”
But Kermit with his quick attention said to Susan, really addressing his question to Emily, “Are you and Miss Walker cousins? She’s not my aunt, Susan, I just call her that.” Then it suddenly struck him and he said, “Then you must be cousins of Theron Walker.”
Emily said, “We’re only distantly related to Miss Walker. Very distant.”
But to Kermit the interesting thing was that they were related to Theron, just as it was the interesting thing about Miss Walker. It was interesting because Theron Walker was a poet. He said, “But then you must be related to Theron Walker, her nephew?”
“I don’t know him,” Emily said. “I suppose if Miss Walker’s his aunt we’re related. But I don’t know him.”
“The poet,” Kermit explained. “One of our best poets. You must be cousins of some kind.”
A family was a family to Kermit and he could not believe, since some relationship existed between Theron and Emily through Miss Walker, that Emily did not know of it. And a family was a family to Susan, especially, perhaps, if it could give her kinship with a poet. She shook her mother’s arm to jog her memory. “Don’t you remember him from when you were a little girl?”
“No,” said Emily. She said to Kermit, “I only knew one nephew of Miss Walker’s. His name was Ralph. He was a little boy when I knew him, about thirteen.”
“That’s Theron!” Kermit cried in triumph. “Ralph Theron Walker. He hated the name Ralph and dropped it.”
“Oh,” said Emily. She allowed the memory to come. “Ralph? And he became a poet? You see, I’m not in touch with the family. Miss Walker and I haven’t been in touch for a long time. How is Ralph?”
“You don’t know?” Kermit said. “He’s dead. He died in Spain.”
“In Spain? Fighting?”
“Well, he went to fight. But he stepped on a nail and died of lockjaw.”
A shadow passed over Susan’s face at this quick loss of a new poet cousin. She stood beside her mother for her mother’s arm to encircle her.
And now Kermit was in one of his quandaries. For he wanted to renew his old acquaintance with Aunt Julia. But he did not like to seem to take sides in what must be a family breach by abandoning the Caldwells for Miss Walker.
“Your cousin wrote poems about Miss Walker,” Kermit said to Susan. “One of them was called ‘The Pulia of My Aunt Joodle.’”
“What?” said Susan in a spurt of laughter. “Oh, that’s crazy.”
“Yes, that’s the name of it. She had a dog, a big black poodle. And he twisted the names around and called your cousin Joodle and the dog a pulia, to suggest how much they meant to each other.”
“Joodle!” said Susan with great pleasure as her cousin ceased to be a dead man. “Pulia!”
“You saw that dog, Susan, when you were very little,” Emily said. “Do you remember? A big black dog. He’s dead now.”
Susan tried hard but she could not remember.
“You played with him and he licked your face. You laughed.”
Susan was struggling with the idea that a dog in a poem was an actual dog who had licked her face. Having made so lively a figure of the poet for her, Kermit now felt it was all right to leave.
“If you’ll excuse me for a moment?” he asked gravely.
But only Maxim went with him, for Nancy still felt her grievance against Miss Walker, and Arthur stayed with Nancy. As for Laskell, he helped make Kermit’s departure possible by turning to talk to Emily.
“It’s warm here,” Laskell said. “Would you like to go outside?” The supper was over. They were all rising from the table.
She shook her head as if he ought to know better than to ask. “But we could sit near the door,” she said. They went and sat near the rear door. The evening was beginning to come on.
“Did it trouble you—all that talk about your family?” He knew something of the quarrel with Miss Walker which had followed the affair with Duck and the marriage.
“No,” she said, “not really. Except to think of Ralph being dead. I didn’t really like him as a boy. He didn’t like me. He spent the vacation with Julia Walker the summer I was her companion. You know how boys are, that was the summer I met my husband. He knew what was going on. They hate things like that at a certain age. I used to climb out of my window late at night and Ralph knew it and he used to stay up and make a noise like an owl out of the window. But I suppose he changed. He must have changed to become a poet.”
The tables were now all empty and were being pushed to one end of the hall while a group of men and boys set up the wooden folding chairs, ranging them in rows to face the little platform.
Susan came up to them. “Mother!” she said, “it’s going to start right away. I have to get ready.”
“Yes, dear. What’s there to get ready?”
“I mean—it’s starting soon—” and Susan pointed to the group of five or six children who were being collected by Mr. Gurney. She was full of impatience, any child’s impatience to join the group she belongs to. But she needed some encouragement to do what she wanted.
“Go ahead, dear. And do nicely.”
“I will,” Susan said. And she turned to Laskell and said with conspiratorial assurance, “I won’t forget.”
“Good—don’t,” he said. And for the first time he really saw that there was a gap where one of Susan’s teeth had not yet come in. The space had always been there, ever since he had known Susan, but he had somehow never seen it before, this always funny mark of a child’s childishness and growth. He reached out and laid his hand on her cheek, and to his surprise she nestled the cheek into his palm, tilting her head to do so, and then she was gone in a bustle of importance.
“She’s sweet,” Laskell said.
“What is it she won’t forget?”
“Oh, just a suggestion about how to say it.” His answer was brusque because he was suddenly aware that in some strange fashion he had taken a responsibility for the child. And perhaps that was why he said, “Is her father coming?”
“If he can.” She spoke as if Duck were detained by many duties which he would hasten through to come to see his daughter perform. But then she said, “He probably can’t.” Laskell knew that Kermit’s whisky was to be held accountable.
The evening was cool and the sunlight that fell on the grass within their view had a liquid quality, as if it were not only lighting the grass but moistening it as well. Emily sat quiet, looking worn and tired. He thought that perhaps the sudden reminder of her past had wearied her, her recollection of herself as a young woman climbing out of her bedroom window to meet her lover while Theron Walker hooted like an owl. Perhaps she was oppressed by the realization that enough years had passed to change that hooting boy to a man and a poet, to someone old enough to make the decision to go to Spain, and old enough to die there. Laskell had nothing to say to her. He knew her so little that he could not even guess what she was feeling. So they sat there, dull and commonplace with each other, and yet snatching together a moment of rest—she from her life of troubles, he from his life of uncertainty.
Suddenly she caught his arm. Duck was entering the hall through the other door and stood surveying the company, most of whom had found seats in the rows of folding chairs. He was dressed in a fresh white shirt. He had taken pains to prepare for the occasion, for he had shaved, and down his cheek ran a rivulet of blood where he had cut himself. It must have been quite a gash, for the blood was thick and had already dripped to stain the collar of the white shirt. Duck looked about him with elaborate dignity and chose an end seat in the second row of chairs. He walked steadily but carefully, and when he sat down he sat heavily and with a noise.
When once Emily had clutched Laskell’s arm, she did nothing more, and she released her hold and seemed to regain her composure. But she did not go to sit with her husband, although there was a vacant place on his right. When it was time for them to come forward for the performance, she sat with Laskell as far back as possible, in the last row, and this was a measure of her alienation from her husband, for it was an action that would surely be marked by her neighbors.
At last everyone was seated and the performance might begin. Why it did not begin was a question that could be answered only through an understanding of the particular spirit which presides over amateur performances, a spirit with laws peculiar to itself, though not unlike the laws which govern the behavior of the spirits that preside over nations or bureaucracies. The audience was ready, the performers were huddled together in a daze, the minister walked about with apparently nothing else to do except begin, but until the spirit should be properly appeased by a full offering of whispered conferences among certain members of the committee in charge, by coughs and by shufflings, the performance could not begin. At last it began.
The first number on the program, Mr. Gurney announced, was to be Columba Parks’ piano rendition of “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers.” Mr. Gurney had explained that the program was to be a short one and an individual one. By that, he said, he meant that it was not to be cooperative, like a pageant or a play.
“Cooperative!” said Emily Caldwell with a mild, maternal bitterness. “With all the other children getting the best parts and Susan always a maiden or a lady-in-waiting.”
It was very small-minded of her, but Laskell nodded in sympathy.
Mr. Gurney went on to say that each of the children was going to make an offering of whatever he—or she—most wanted to do. If, therefore, he said, the effort was not cooperative, it was at least spontaneous. Why Mr. Gurney used language like this could be understood when he mentioned that the congregation was fortunate to have several guests whom he ventured to welcome in the name of all. And he smiled at the row of chairs which contained Arthur, Nancy, Kermit, and Maxim. And then he welcomed Miss Walker by name and said she was known to everyone here.
Columba Parks was much like her mother, appearing to have begun life at the point which her mother had reached after some years, or perhaps to have faded before she had bloomed. When she had finished her rendition of “The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers” and had been applauded in a very friendly way, she gave as an encore “The Waltz of the Roses.”
“Susan was not told to have an encore,” said Emily. Laskell felt the injustice of this.
“Our next little performer,” said Mr. Gurney, “and I should explain that our program is arranged in order
of the performers’ age—our next little performer will be Susan Caldwell.”
Susan rose from her seat in the front row and walked with a high head up onto the platform. Laskell felt very apprehensive. There was a spattering of applause, but above that was heard the loud measured clapping of a single pair of hands. They were Duck Caldwell’s and he held them up to show.
“Susan is going to oblige us with the recitation of a little poem, a very beautiful little poem I’m sure you’ll find it, by the eccentric English poet William Blake. Susan!” And Mr. Gurney pointed a sudden finger at Susan as he said her name in a quick bark, much in the way a referee galvanizes into existence a prizefighter in his corner.
Laskell dreaded that Susan would make a curtsy, but she simply bowed graciously to the minister and was no doubt about to bow in a similar way to the audience when Mr. Gurney put his arm around her shoulder and announced, “Susan Caldwell: a poem by William Blake.” The minister returned to the back of the stage and sat down.
There was applause and again the sound of Duck’s hollow palms beaten together three times. Susan glanced quickly at her father, and then when the sound was not made again, bowed to her audience. She took her position of naturalness, and Laskell had to admit that it was natural enough. Her eyes sought the very back of the hall.
The Middle of the Journey Page 32
