Boys and Girls Come Out to Play

by Nigel Dennis

  “I am ashamed.”

  “Yes, you should be ashamed—and I mean really ashamed, not just ashamed. Why ever do you do it?”

  “Oh well, there’s something so puny about him …”

  “Heavens, you wouldn’t like me to get you some old-fashioned schoolmaster, with a stick, would you?”

  “I don’t know. I might, really. I feel ashamed when Petty gives up because I know I couldn’t have gone on like that with someone I was frightened of. I’m nearly always frightened when a new man comes, and then when he turns out to be someone ordinary and feeble, I can’t help being relieved, and mean. I’m such a coward, really; that’s what I’m really ashamed of, all the time.”

  “Don’t be so silly,” said his mother, frowning indignantly. “You’ve always shown great courage in meeting a terrible handicap.”

  “Any dope can do that. What else would one do?”

  “Don’t talk that way … Now, I have a lot to do; kiss me, and go for a good walk.”

  After the secretary had brought in some papers and they had worked for half an hour, Mrs. Morgan pulled her big spectacles away from her eyes, and asked: “Where did he go?”

  “Up Kriss Mountain.”

  “I wish he wouldn’t go there. It’s the worst place in the world if anything happens, and everyone knows it’s full of rattlers.” She began to sigh heavily. “I just don’t know what to do. I’ve done everything that’s safe.”

  The secretary, who was not long out of Vassar, said what she had been dying to say for weeks. “Perhaps a good psychiatrist, Mrs. Morgan …”

  “I know that, but what school? I have great respect for Freud, but Jimmy has quite enough to perplex him already. I have a kind of feeling … And then there are others who are mystical. Certainly that would do him no good; he’s too full of imagination as it is. Perhaps a good all-round man,” she murmured, picturing at once someone very broad and plump, hung all over with a variety of fraternity keys: “someone like that, perhaps … Or I might send him to that man who believes in electric shocks, but it does make me nervous to think of that. And everything always seems so encouraging at first. Doctors are always so calm; they have such a sense of responsibility: that’s why it’s always so much more discouraging afterwards, when they’ve not been able to do anything. I really don’t know; I’m at my wits’ end. Well, let’s go on … To Mr. Henry Baldwin: Dear Henry, of course I shall be there—I know your rallies, exclamation. Three-fifty a plate seems a little steep to me too, but the Browning always gives good food and service, and some of the best speakers will be there. You can try to get Zilla, but frankly I don’t see why Jugoslavia should come into it. A really good man from one of the unions in the South seems to me the real need: everyone knows Detroit. I can promise you a mention in next week’s Forward; this week’s has just gone to press. Cordially, as ever, sign Gertrude … And then I think you’d better go to the library, and while you’re there tell Wellcomes that we’ll need at least enough for twenty people on Sunday, and lamb if possible, I mean chops, of course. Oh, and my dear, just a minute; tell Carmichael that the top bar on Jimmy’s window is not strong and that he should see to it properly this time, when Jimmy’s out like today, not in … You look tired; are you tired?”

  “Just the day of the month, Mrs. Morgan,” said the secretary, smiling with pretty melancholy.

  “Oh yes indeed; you expect that; well; just do the library, will you; and, yes, I’m afraid you’ll have to do Wellcomes or it’ll be too late: I’ll talk to Carmichael myself: afterwards you go and rest. I think summer is really here at last, don’t you?”

  “It looks that way, Mrs. Morgan: all the birds …”

  “All the birds, yes, and the grass. Well, you run along and I’ll speak to Carmichael and then you rest.”

  *

  Mrs. Morgan was the owner and financier of a weekly progressive magazine, but she was not a person who felt guilty about hymning an experimental future from a rooted position. Dignity had been essential to her, even as a child, and she had always known that, given enough money, dignity can be thrown up around the spender as quickly as a big-top. Her late husband had supplied the money, and long before his death she had gone to work establishing herself in surroundings that gave her confidence. She rightly believed that a fine old establishment can be grown in a few years, that mellow dignity asks only a site that has some old trees: the rest can be done in no time with a good head-gardener, seasoned wood, old bricks in the hands of a nostalgic architect, shipments of well-grown rosebushes and thousands of spring bulbs, some espalier fruit trees for a walled garden, a herbiary, a little toying with a good brook and a rustic bridge for it, plenty of changeable sunlight and shadow, truckloads of gravel, unlimited lawn space, some pigeons and an old bell. Now, twenty years later, her home had not merely such old-time charms as cushioned bay-windows and a lozenge-windowed library in which it was impossible to read without electric light, there were also the dividends that greedy, unsentimental Nature pays so readily to the new-rich. Among the heavy shrubs, for instance, which were planted around mossy stretches of lawn, there were already those fortuitous alcoves of shade and silence that seem to the delighted visitor to have grown with the centuries; and birds of every sort, moles and woodchucks swarmed over the grounds in such numbers that they sometimes had to be shot. There had been times when Mrs. Morgan feared that advanced people might find a contradiction between the radical sympathies she expressed and the old-fashioned, expensive dignity in which she lived; but everyone seemed to conclude in a generous way that her magazine was the true child of her good heart and mind, and her estate an involuntary inheritance from her rich and backward husband. “I should be every bit as happy, even more happy, in just an apartment in New York,” she often said, to be on the safe side.

  The forty lamb chops that the secretary had examined on Friday were for Mrs. Morgan’s first big luncheon of the year. Every Sunday through the summer, she entertained guests, most of whom came out from New York and spent the day. They might arrive as early as they pleased, but lunch was always set for two o’clock, so that guests who woke with hangovers had until midday to grope their way to the train. An open invitation stood for all members of the staff of Forward, down as far as assistant editors: typists and other girls were invited singly, by turn. The remaining guests were interesting people.

  Between one and two on this particular Sunday, things were going on as usual. Mrs. Morgan was in the library talking to a visitor who wanted to see her privately. Her son was sulkily writing the names of the guests on small cards and placing them around the table in squat, pottery holders. The coloured chauffeur was just driving off to meet the next train from New York. The forty lamb chops were piled up in a heap on the kitchen table. Mrs. Morgan’s father had withdrawn to his bedroom; scarcely any of the guests had ever laid eyes on him.

  Outside, in the grounds, the scene held the relaxed but dignified look of a monastery garden. The brook was bubbling and racing with spring rain, and two elderly editors were leaning over the rustic bridge and dropping in twigs. Economists and critics were slowly pacing the lawn, their hands clasped behind their backs, their heads nodding slowly in time with their steps. A literary editor in a tweed jacket and heavy shoes was pointing the stem of his pipe at various shrubs and trees that were new to his companion, a refugee from the Balkans. A group of four were aligned on the old iron seat below the biggest elm: one of them was a Negro columnist from the South, and the other three were putting him at his ease by talking so casually and naturally that he could scarcely understand a word. A few others, devout horticulturists, had gone off to the walled garden to study Mr. Carmichael’s distinguished work. From time to time, out of the poised, amicable discussions of recent articles, book reviews, defections and political policies, came the hearty, friar’s laugh of the successful intellect taking his ease.

  At one forty-five, a coloured maid in uniform crossed from the kitchen door to the old-world garage, and pulled on the ol
d bell. The pigeons shot into the air as spontaneously and frantically as pigeons have done for thousands of years; the enthusiasts in the walled garden looked at their grubby hands and began to wander toward the house. The big Cadillac swept up the gravelled driveway and deposited the last of the guests, who were greeted with cries of happy surprise. It was fifteen minutes to lunch.

  Morgan was sitting in the panelled passageway that ran between the library and the living room. The guests, coming in to wash, greeted him as warmly as ever, calling him Jimmy and giving him a friendly smile. They knew about his illness and felt sorry for him, and always fell into the tact and bluffness of sympathetic doctors. Sometimes they stopped to talk to him, choosing their words carefully and speaking distinctly. He divided their remarks into two categories: those he despaired of ever being brilliant enough to say himself, and those which he knew he would never be stupid enough to say himself. He had been frightened of most of the guests, until he found that all of them were frightened of his mother; after which he classed most of them with his tutors. He also often felt deep contempt for his mother, who blundered along in a very unintellectual way during luncheon talks; but he admired her for caring so little about her gaffes, and despised her sycophants for being too frightened to jump on her. He knew by now that she ran the machine, that she knew when to be persuaded and by whom; that she knew what power she held and used it fully; that the magazine was her way of making her life race along in a productive way and its contributors the clowns who protected her from boredom. Morgan rarely read the articles they wrote, but he always read with envy the short biographical notes that accompanied their articles, and wondered at the magic wand that changed the unprepossessing man-in-the-flesh into the kingly man-in-print. “Thomas Swayne is a young Vermonter whose first novel, Saga for John, a study of the interior conflicts of a young rebel who finds himself bitterly at odds with his environment, was published last Fall. He is now at work on a critical study of Leonardo da Vinci.” “Herman Dimbeck teaches Restoration Drama at White River College.” “Arthur Riker has spent the last ten years in extensive study of the Swiss cantonment system. His forthcoming book is called The Land of William Tell.”

  The sun shone through the Gothic windows; Morgan lay back on the padded seat, his mind in its usual half-drugged state and now irritated and stretched by the loose, scatterbrained after-effects of his recent attack. He heard his mother’s and her visitor’s voices suddenly grow louder inside the library; they were coming toward the door; the visitor gave a loud, happy laugh. When the door opened Max Divver came out, red in the face and beaming. Morgan knew him well: he was a husky, swarthy, political writer with hairy hands; he was often spoken of as “the man who shouted at Mussolini.” Morgan greatly respected his physical size and strength, and saw no reason why anyone who looked so impressive should be expected to think too. Now Divver came down the passage with such energy that he had almost passed Morgan before he noticed him and stopped. He put his hands behind his back, surveyed Morgan with a contented smile, and then said, laughing: “Well, Jimmy, my boy! How’d you like to come to Poland with me?”

  The second bell rang, and the guests began to move into the dining-room.

  *

  Max Divver’s father had edited a small, liberal, agnostical newspaper in Des Moines for twenty-five years. He raised his son on the same principles as his editorials: the world, he believed, was pinched between good and evil men. Which of the two groups a man joined, Mr. Divver said, depended on each person’s capacity for honest thinking, discipline and unselfishness. Hanging somewhere in the no-man’s-land that was neither wholly good nor wholly evil, Mr. Divver recognized people who were merely indifferent or misguided or lazy or plagued with doubts; but he was not very much concerned with them; if they liked his paper, they could buy it; meanwhile, he had a job to do. At the age of five, Max was given a text to hang above his bed: THE TRUTH IS MIGHTY AND IT SHALL PREVAIL.

  Max came to New York in the middle twenties with more or less the same opinions as his father’s. He spent six months in a post-graduate course at a New York university—and staggered out a changed man. He had fallen victim to devastating revelations, and never again did he experience the pain and misery of those six months.

  The revelations concerned Forces and Man. It had never before entered Divver’s head that persons and objects did not have a self-contained existence. Now he discovered—at least, this was the only way he was able to interpret his new lessons without becoming totally confused—that neither he nor anyone had any more independence than prisoners exercising in a yard; they were merely circling spots, compelled by Forces. These Forces were called history, and various other names, and they made old Mr. Divver’s simple groups of black or white souls look as irresponsible as minnows.

  If this had been all, Divver might have borne it. But at the same time he discovered that there were not only the omnipotent forces of history outside him, but equally omnipotent ones inside him. Like most boys and girls, he had thought of his mind as a kind of control-tower which did its best to keep his lusts in order and his limbs in motion, and succeeded moderately well. Now, he found that this was a naïve illusion: his mind had no more influence on him than it had on history: or rather, it did have some influence, but only of a very dishonest kind, called rationalization.

  These two revelations embraced a third: that nothing was what it appeared to be, and rarely even that. Persons and things were no more than large or small illustrations of the inside and outside Forces. What was more; as a symbol of the Forces, the person or thing was almost sure to be travelling in the opposite direction to that in which it believed it was heading as a self-controlled incorporation.

  These revelations did not settle on Divver’s shoulder like a sequence of doves. He didn’t learn them from his professors or from source-books, although both had much to say about them. He picked them up reluctantly in bits and pieces, because everyone his own age was talking about them, and he was ambitious. The New York students talked in a manner that was strange and cruel to his provincial nature: they seemed to him the most objectionable persons he had ever met. When Divver remarked, modestly but with a certain air, that his father edited the Des Moines Bugle, a sneer of elastic spread crossed their faces, as though they had been told that Mr. Divver was a hangman who rode to work on a quaint velocipede. After only a few weeks of classes Divver had learned to be terrified of their intense superciliousness and contempt. They too, they informed him sourly, had high ideals of honesty, and they lost no time in telling Divver that his own ideas of honesty were the wickedest, cheapest forms of self-delusion, invented by the very enemies of society against whom they were fighting. They also made clear that everything that had gone into Divver’s making, and all that he respected and depended on, were parts of a social disease, and that Divver himself was typhoid-Mary disguised as a hick. When Divver objected, as he did at first, clumsily and angrily, they took him apart with arguments that bewildered him completely, and a certain smile that he came to know well and to dread appeared on their faces. They seemed to use this smile chiefly when Divver tried to strengthen his lonely position by citing some great progressive figure out of American history; after they had smiled, they dismissed the great figure in language so scurrilous that Divver was appalled. If he continued to argue, they were able to recite one incident after another from Divver’s idol’s career, incidents that revealed the man as totally corrupt. At that point Divver always found that he was too badly informed to go on arguing. Often, they went on to discuss Divver’s own attitude to society and progress. They confidently insulted him with phrases that he had never heard before, but soon came to fear far more than charges of being a murderer or a rapist—charges which would, in fact, have entitled him to the students’ sympathy. One student went so far as publicly to describe Divver as a “reformist”—an epithet that resulted in his being ostracized for ten days.

  Divver’s hatred of these new acquaintances came out in long, ferocio
us arguments that he would conduct against them while lying alone in bed: then, he would evoke their unpleasant sneering faces and turn them into messes of blood and smashed bone with his primitive fists. He hated them, especially when their names were Slavic and Jewish: at heart he believed it was intolerable that these sharp, hateful aliens should have been admitted into a country that was progressing well enough in a slow, honest way without them. He had been taught to be proud that his country had opened its doors to millions of immigrants; he did not dare to revise this opinion now, but he would have been overjoyed, secretly, if an epidemic had killed all the latecomers off. He hated them for their lack of respect for his generosity in having admitted them. He hated them for despising his father, his home, his books, his plain ideas; he hated them for their passionate interest in Europe; he hated them for the doubts they introduced into his way of life, and because they made him realize that he had never tried to think. What was so painful was that these students were unquestionably the most talented people in the class; Divver couldn’t do without them because already he felt contempt for the friendlier students who were like himself.

  There was one exception to this. Because Divver was even more frightened of the pugnacious girl radicals than he was of the boys, he confided his fury and desperation to a mild, pretty girl who came from his own State. She soon developed such unshakeable faith in Divver’s Tightness and strength of character that sometimes he actually had to slap her down quite severely and defend his enemies, because her support of him was so uncritical as to make him feel ridiculous. “I’m a very ordinary sort of guy,” he once told her angrily, “and it only discourages me to have you talk as if I had nothing to learn. I have a great deal to learn. Do you think I want to stay just the way I am all my life?” Nonetheless, in spite of his doggedness and half-hearted attempts to learn, Divver continued for another six months in a state of harrowing uncertainty as to whether or not he should abandon his father and go over to his opponents. At last he made what was really a compromise: he left the University, but he married the girl.