by David Karp
“What was it you didn’t want Mrs. Greevy to hear?” Hughes asked as he sipped his coffee.
“Well,” Cumbers bit off a bit of sugar cake, regarded the piece left for a moment, and then talked, chewing the brittle cake as he spoke, “it’s about this Church of State. To tell you the truth, this wasn’t the first time I’ve been to one of their meetings. I’ve been a couple of times before. Just hopped in, stayed awhile, and hopped out. Didn’t impress me much, to tell you the whole truth. I couldn’t make much sense of it. But tonight—well, tonight was very different. I had the feeling that I wanted to belong. I had the feeling that these people were my brothers and sisters and that they wanted me. I don’t pretend I understood it all. I don’t. But then, I’ve never understood religion very much. As a kid, you know, your folks make you go to Sunday school and church and all that. It’s the thing to do. But it didn’t make much sense to me. Too many things wrong with the world that God couldn’t seem to handle. And there were lots of things that weren’t explained. And then I didn’t particularly get the feeling that I was very important in the scheme of things.”
“And does this Church of State thing make you feel that important?”
“Well, yes, in a way. I mean, it makes me feel as if I would be important with all the others. Mrs. Greevy’s got a devil of a lot of friends. She doesn’t see them because she’s mainly too lazy to stir out of the house without company and then, there’s the captain. She’s afraid if she’s left the house he’ll drop in and she won’t see him for an hour or more. Of course it’s not likely that he will or if he does he’d mind waiting another hour or so to meet her—but Mrs. Greevy’s queer in lots of ways and she was right when she warned you not to judge the Church of State people by her. But the point is she’s got a world full of friends and all of them from the meeting place. Real friends, good friends. They’d do anything for her. Why, I remember last winter she was sick and there were people running in and out of the house taking care of her twenty-four hours a day. Different people almost every hour on the hour, but all of them worried about Mrs. Greevy. That’s what I mean by friends.”
“I see,” Hughes said softly, looking at Cumbers and pitying the man more and more.
“Of course, I’ve never had much of a family. No brothers or sisters and my mother and father died before I was eighteen and it’s cruel for a boy that age to be thrown on the world. In a way I know what Ralph Doughton’s gone through. We’re of different stripes, though, and I didn’t turn out to be the sort of stinker he is. And he’s better off even than me. He’s got his aunt and she cares about him. No aunt for me—no one to give a damn, in fact. I was never much to attract a girl’s eye. At least you’ve been married. I never was. No girl would have me and those that would—well, there was always something wrong with them, you know,” Cumbers said and crooked a shoulder, grimaced grotesquely, and stuck out his tongue to display imbecility by way of illustration of the women who would have him. Hughes laughed softly out of politeness. “Well,” Cumbers went on, biting into the sugar cake, “that was the situation. Not good. A lonely sort of life for me. Until you came along I didn’t have a friend in the world. I could have had a furnished room somewhere else and made up my own meals. It would have been lots cheaper. But, my God, I’d die in a room like that. No one would know about me. The people here aren’t anything to cheer about but in God’s name at least they know I’m alive—they care a bit. They put up a show of being friends and I can sometimes get the feeling that I belong here. But I don’t really belong. I don’t really feel as if I belong.” Cumbers stopped, sipped his coffee, and then, in a very small voice, asked, “Well, what do you think? Ought I to take the plunge?”
“Cumbers,” Hughes said softly, “why did you ask me about it? I mean, after all, if you’re thinking of joining this church—well, wouldn’t Mrs. Greevy be a better person to talk to?”
“No, no,” Cumbers disagreed, shaking his head, “she’s prejudiced in the matter. She’d see nothing wrong in it. She’d be all for it. She’d pray me right out of my mind until I joined. No, I want to keep it quiet from her awhile. I mean, I feel I ought to collect my thoughts on the subject and talk it over with someone who knows me. I’ve decided lots of things for myself in my life but I don’t feel many of them were very important. In a sense I’ve never had to decide anything important—it’s been taken out of my hands and decided for me. Either by my parents, or the money I’ve had, or the jobs I’ve held, the places I’ve lived. I mean, I never decided not to marry. I just kept putting it off and the first thing I knew there wasn’t anyone to marry me—at least that I could stand two days in a row. So that big decision was taken right out of my hands. It’s been that way with all the big problems of my life—either put off or solved for me one way or the other. But this is something else. This is a big decision and it’s the first I’ve had to face. What do you think, Hughes?”
Hughes thought about it for a long moment. He felt it was obvious that Cumbers would come to this. And it was probably the best road for Cumbers. But could he advise him without hurting his feelings? “Cumbers, you’ve put a great problem in my lap. I don’t know exactly how to go about answering you.” He hesitated for a moment, licked his lips, and decided the truth was what Cumbers needed and he would put it as tactfully as he could. “The fact of the matter is that you’re asking me to call upon experience I don’t have. I don’t remember a great deal of my past life—not even now. Not much, that is. In a way, I’ve been seeing everything for the first time. It may sound strange to you, but that snowfall outside is the first I’ve seen. Oh, of course I know there are such things and I know more or less what they should look like, but I don’t have any snowfalls in my memory to compare this one with. To me it’s like the first snowfall primitive man must have seen his first winter on earth—magical, mysterious, beautiful—the first in memory. So I don’t know if I can give you sensible advice. But here’s what I’ve thought: You’re a man who’s miserable by himself. You don’t really want to be Cumbers—Mr. Cumbers—the Mr. Cumbers—the only one of your sort in the world. You want to be like all the others. You want to belong to something larger than yourself. Perhaps, as you say, it’s because you’ve never had much of a family, or a wife, or good close friends or any of these things. But my feeling is that it goes deeper—my feeling is that there’s a hole inside of you that gives you a hollow, scared feeling, and that hole demands filling. We’re all born with the same hollow feeling and it gets worse when we find out how lonely we can be, how cruel the world can appear, how liable to death and hurt and misery we are. Some people always feel naked unless they’re part of a crowd and that’s what this church is—a crowd. It cares about all the parts of the crowd the way an animal with a thousand feet might care about the toes on one of his feet. He’s got nine hundred and ninety-nine other feet, each with five toes on them, but this one toe on the thousandth foot hurts and he hurts all over because of it. Now, being a toe like that might make you happy. You know that there’s something much huger than yourself to take care of you if you’re in trouble. But you give up a lot becoming a toe. For one thing, you give up the chance to walk by yourself. You give up being yourself. In this church they never say ‘me’ or ‘I’ or ‘mine.’ It’s always ‘us,’ ‘we,’ ‘ours.’ ”
“Is that so bad?” Cumbers asked.
Hughes saw then that nothing he would say could dissuade Cumbers. It was bad but if Cumbers did not see it there was no point going on. “If you want to give up your individuality then I’d say this is the best way to do it. Life will be simpler, warmer, more comfortable for you once you’ve given up being just Mr. Cumbers.”
“You wouldn’t do it, would you?” Cumbers asked, looking at him closely in the gloriously mingled colored lights from the tree.
“No,” Hughes said, “I have a great deal to find out about myself. I’m really only a bit of myself but I add to the bit every day. One day I’ll be Hughes—the one Mr. Hughes of which there is no other
on earth. It may not be the happiest thing in the world for me—but it’s what I want.”
24
New Year’s came and went and on the first business day of the new year, which was Monday, the fourth of January, Cumbers received a letter from the Department of Internal Examination requesting that he present himself for an interview with the Deputy Commissioner, Mr. Lark. Cumbers went to work, informed his superior of the letter, and was given the morning off.
At eleven o’clock that morning Cumbers presented himself to the receptionist and was sent up in the elevator, down long corridors, and then finally to the anteroom of Lark’s office. There he was told by the male secretary to wait—that the Deputy Commissioner was occupied. Cumbers sat down and waited, his pale blue eyes patient, his manner relaxed. This was undoubtedly the first report on Hughes and there was nothing to report on Hughes that was not favorable. His antisocial behavior was nonexistent. He was warm and friendly, willing to mix with others, did his work well at the quartermaster section, and was, in every way, a credit to himself and to the State. Cumbers was pleased to report this and this pleasure made him patient.
Lark was occupied in his office with the heretical political analyst, Doctor Wright. And the subject of the conversation which had been going on for over an hour before Cumbers arrived was Hughes.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Wright said, pulling unhappily at his mustache.
“Yes, Doctor?”
“Why should you care whether I know if you’ve succeeded or not? I wasn’t directly connected with the project.”
“But you were,” Lark said, smiling. “You were the person I had to convince. Not the Commissioner, not my associates like Conger or Julian Richard or Doctor Emmerich or any of the others, not even myself. You,” Lark pointed a bony forefinger, “were the one. None other.”
“But why?”
“Because you wanted us to fail. You wanted it more than anything else.”
Wright shrugged his narrow shoulders as if it were a matter of indifference to him. “Why should I care either way?” he asked in the face of Lark’s knowing smile.
“Don’t you remember your own analysis of the situation? That Burden represented the beginning of the heresies and the heretics with which we would have to deal in enormous numbers twenty, thirty, forty years from now?”
Wright hesitated. It had been a rash thing to say but true—wonderfully, splendidly true. If they failed with Burden it meant the end of a hideously benevolent state. If they succeeded, the future would be smothered for untold generations. Wright had prayed for their failure as he had never prayed for anything in his life, but prayer was all he could ever manage to help Burden. He shrank from any action and these devils knew it—none better than Lark. “Yes,” Wright finally said, “I know what my analysis was—and still is.”
“That’s why I wanted you here. I wanted you to hear a progress report on Burden, now Hughes,” Lark said, coldly confident.
Then they had not failed, Wright thought unhappily. Lark would not have called him in to hear a progress report if he did not already know what the report would contain. Lark lifted the telephone receiver on his desk.
“Has Mr. Cumbers arrived yet?” Lark nodded with a smile to Wright. “Send him right in, please.”
Wright could not help but stare at Cumbers when he came into the room. Cumbers did not resemble one of their agents. But then, they were particularly astute in their choices. They used thousands of agents of varying abilities and responsibilities and told them only so much of the truth as they felt necessary for an agent to function.
“Mr. Cumbers,” Lark said, indicating a chair with his hand. Cumbers thanked Lark with his eyes and looked vaguely respectful in his glance at Doctor Wright.
“Mr. Cumbers has been a good friend of Mr. Hughes ever since he left the hospital, Doctor,” Lark said to Wright by way of explanation.
“I’ve tried to be, sir,” Cumbers said soberly, wondering whether the doctor was one who had helped treat his friend.
“Tell us about Hughes, Mr. Cumbers,” Lark said gently. “Has he made a good adjustment, do you think?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Cumbers said vigorously. “Why, he’s just fine.”
“Made friends?”
“Lots of them, sir. Everyone in the rooming house has a kind word for him and he for them. And at work the other clerks think he’s a grand fellow. No complaint on that.”
“Well, I know a great deal about Mr. Hughes and his work, Mr. Cumbers,” Lark said patiently. “There have been other reports on his progress in those directions. I want to get a little deeper into the things he’s talked over with you—his attitudes, his feelings. Has he any moods? Depression? Unhappiness? Anything out of the ordinary?”
“Absolutely none,” Cumbers said, shaking his head. “He’s been in good humor, takes things calmly, doesn’t keep to himself. We’ve gotten to be real friends, sir.”
“Discussed a great deal, you two?”
“Almost everything and anything you can name. Talked about his wife and about his loss of memory, all those things, you know. He hasn’t held back a bit.”
“Was there anything about those things that disturbed him?”
“No, sir,” Cumbers replied with certainty.
“Has Hughes raised any questions about the State that might cause you to doubt his loyalty to it?”
“Absolutely not,” Cumbers appeared so shocked that both Lark and Wright smiled faintly. “He’s a good citizen, a fine man, an honorable man. He would never think or say such a thing.”
“Yes, yes,” Lark said by way of soothing the obviously upset Mr. Cumbers, “but we have to know everything about Mr. Hughes. You understand that he was once guilty of antisocial behavior, of disloyalty to the State. That’s why I asked the question.” Lark did not use the word heresy to Cumbers because it was more than likely that Cumbers would not understand it and in order to explain its official meaning Lark would have had to upset Cumbers’ thinking, a situation one avoided with such minor agents as Mr. Cumbers.
“You need have no fear on that score, sir,” Cumbers persisted. “Hughes is loyal and no man can say a word against him. I don’t know what he was before. I can’t speak too much about that. But the man who’s become my friend is a man who wouldn’t lie, who would tell the truth—even if it hurt himself or others. He’s hiding nothing.”
Lark sensed something in the remark and glanced at Wright. But the political analyst sat in his chair, his hands patiently in his lap, watching Cumbers. “Tell me, Mr. Cumbers,” Lark said softly, “what makes you think Hughes would tell the truth about something if it would hurt him?”
“Well, I’ve got reason for that, sir,” Cumbers said seriously, “because I’ve seen it happen.”
“What was it and when did it happen?”
“Christmas Eve. I’ll never forget it as long as I live, sir. It showed me what a true friend Hughes was.”
“Well, tell us about Christmas Eve, Mr. Cumbers.”
“Hughes and I and Mrs. Greevy, she’s one of the boarders in the house, all went to a Church of State meetinghouse for the services, I guess you’d call them. Mrs. Greevy’s Church of State and she was lonely and I forgot whose idea it was, but Hughes agreed right away, although he’s not Church of State and he doesn’t think much of it.”
Lark felt a muscle jump in his throat. “Mr. Cumbers—how do you know Hughes doesn’t think much of the Church of State?”
“Well, I was coming to that, sir. It’s all part of what happened. I mean, proving to you how good a friend Hughes is and how he’d tell the truth even if it hurt himself or someone he liked.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Cumbers,” Lark said, forcing his voice to remain controlled and even, “please go on. I won’t interrupt again.”
“Well, as I said. We all went to the services and I’ll tell you the truth, I was impressed by them. I came home with Hughes and Mrs. Greevy and after Mrs. Greevy went upstairs I had a long talk
with Hughes. I talked about something that had been weighing on my mind for a long time. I told Hughes that I was thinking of joining the Church of State.” Cumbers paused, thinking back.
“Was that when Mr. Hughes said he did not think much of the Church of State?” Lark asked, feeling a terrible sense of impatience growing inside him.
“No, sir,” Cumbers said, knitting his brows, “that isn’t what he said at all. Come to think of it, he never did say that—not in so many words. He said—the Church of State was like a crowd, and if I felt happier in a crowd I ought to join. He said—” Cumbers nodded then as if he had finally collected his memory on the conversation, “he said that I’d be like a toe on the foot of an animal with a thousand feet. That I would get all the attention of the animal when I was in trouble. He said if that was what I wanted then I should join the Church of State. Now, you see, right there he was telling me a truth about myself—a painful truth. He was saying that I wasn’t much of anything—which, God knows, is the truth, though you always go on believing that it isn’t so, that you do amount to a hill of beans when you don’t. He wasn’t saying it out of meanness. There isn’t a mean bone in that man’s body. But this problem was weighing on my mind and I didn’t know how to solve it and I had asked Hughes for help. Now, to solve a problem as big and tough as the one I had means that you need help—honest help. You need someone to take you by the hand and say, look here, here’s the truth about yourself whether you like it or not. Here’s the truth about you, Cumbers, not what you’d like to hear me say but what I ought to say because you want the truth and you need it. Hughes could have lied to me, made me feel good—he’s a friend of mine and he wants me to like him just the way he likes me. I can see that. You lie to people sometimes to get on their good side. God knows I’ve done it and I suppose you, too, sir—meaning no disrespect. That’s the way people are made. It makes life easier, makes feelings better all around—those little lies, I mean.”
