The Middle of the Journey Page 4

  Illness had surely touched Laskell deeply if he could think about the need for protection at all. And yet—he tried to be fair to himself—it was not unnatural that he should have a dim sense of vulnerability. For quite a time now his everyday life had been beautifully taken care of by someone else; it was not so very strange that he should be aware of a vague danger when his life was again his own responsibility. Possibly he had accepted illness with too much willingness, but even that was not beyond understanding—a man at thirty-three might find advantage in an enforced momentary retreat. It was nothing to be ashamed of, not unless it were allowed to go beyond its proper term. But its proper term had most certainly been reached, Laskell thought, and he settled his shoulders back against the seat and organized within himself a firm and sensible resistance against his foolish anxiety.

  In the Hartford station, in the half-hour between trains, John Laskell found that he was entirely at ease. He had really not liked the idea of being alone and unknown in a strange city. But as he drank a cup of coffee at the restaurant counter he experienced no discomfort at all. He even had a gay sense of adventure—health, he thought, was quite as much of an adventure as sickness had been.

  It would never have occurred to anyone who chanced to notice John Laskell drinking his coffee that he was a man likely to be troubled by an anxiety about not reaching his destination by railroad, or likely to find adventurousness in so ordinary an act as drinking a cup of coffee at a station counter. He took his hat off when he sat down at the counter, and now he was perhaps rather noticeable, for he was strikingly pale and his hair was cut very much shorter than is usual with a man of his general appearance, a man who was well and casually dressed in gray flannel and white oxford shirt and bright striped tie. It was cut as short as hair could be without being actually shaved. This, at first glance, might have made his place in the world uncertain, though actually it confirmed it, for it brought out the shape of his skull, which was clearly the result of an infancy of careful middle-class nourishment. And all of Laskell’s face and manner suggested that he was a person for whom the world might perhaps have absorbing doubts but certainly not any fears. His gray eyes were serious, possibly even sad, but they looked about with the expectation of finding some matter of interest and humor. If his rather wide mouth was almost too mobile and not wholly sure of itself, that was only a pleasant modification of his air of maturity and responsibility. A friend seeing him now would have found his appearance somewhat changed from the usual, the nose more salient, the eyes deeper set, the cheekbones more in evidence, and would have put this down to Laskell’s loss of weight during his illness, to his pallor and to his odd haircut, which had been intended by way of therapy, for his hair had begun to fall out as a result of his fever. But the change from his usual appearance did not diminish the impression of a man who took life in the sensible, normal ways. As he drank his coffee, paid for it, left a dime for the waitress and exchanged a smile and a word or two with her, and went out to the platform again, a man not tall but well set up, almost handsome but fortunate in being just short of that, he appeared to be surely a person for whom the world was a place to be familiarly at home in, for whom trains were run and timetables kept accurate, for whom illness was not usual but who, having once been ill, recovered as fast and as simply as possible, and then, as a most natural thing, traveled to spend a month in the country with friends.

  The little train for Crannock made up here at the station. There were plenty of seats, there was a place for his luggage, the two bags and the rod and creel which had made such an issue between his nurse and himself just before his departure. He scarcely questioned whether it was really the train for Crannock. Everything was in order. Still, it was two o’clock, the empty time, the time when he had been in the habit of taking his nap, and he felt rather tired. It was hot in the train, the windows leaked cinders and his mouth felt gritty and dry. The faces of the passengers were local and countrified. The conductor greeted many of them with some word of recognition, but naturally he did not greet Laskell. And Laskell foolishly felt that he could by no means be sure of the good will of these people with whom he was traveling. He was the stranger, the out-lander, the foreigner from New York. But he held before his mind what it would be like to see Nancy and Arthur Croom on the station platform, waiting for him according to plan. They would be sunburned and healthy and full of affection. They would be even fuller of affection than they always were, because of the dangerous illness he had been through. And Laskell felt the warmth of his own feeling for the Crooms as he thought of the welcome they would give him. He had much to tell them. His picture of them became even livelier as he thought of them listening to his news. First there was the adventure of his having been so near death. Then there was the quite momentous news about Maxim—the grotesque story of his break with the Party.

  Laskell did not catch sight of the Crooms when first he got off the train at Crannock. Nor did he see them when he had recovered from this disappointment and looked around him.

  There was a little row of cars toward which the other passengers who got off were heading. From each car there had come some welcoming person to take a suitcase or an arm or to give a kiss or to utter some fond, welcoming cry. But no one came toward John Laskell. He was sure that it was some trick of his mind that prevented him from seeing the people he was looking for. The Crooms were not there.

  Then they would be here in a moment. There was the road, and Laskell was so certain of their immediate arrival that he almost saw them materialize, driving up the road, waving him their welcome and their frantic regret for the delay. Meanwhile all the cars had driven away. Now the express agent came out with his hand-truck. He collected the packages that had been discharged from the train. The train left. There was a bench and Laskell sat down on it.

  He looked at his watch. The train had not been more than five minutes late—it was impossible that the Crooms could have come and gone. There was no sound save the chatter of the telegraph machine in the office and then the wirelike sound of cicadas rising and falling in the late afternoon, a sound like a mode of silence. The sky was blue and immense. The sun was hot. Laskell saw a little knot of houses and stores, not far from the station, and a row of red filling pumps. He saw a man at the pumps, but the man went away.

  The vertigo of fear began in his stomach and rose in a spiral to his brain. He did not know what he was afraid of. He was not terrified by anything, he was just in terror. It had the aspect of movement, of something rushing at him, or in him, like a brown wind. Some alien intelligence wanted desperately to shriek, yet knew that if it should utter a sound, it would be lost; and wanted blindly to clutch, yet dared not move.

  Afterward Laskell was not really able to recall what had happened to him during those terrible moments. There was no way of reconstituting the occurrence. It was so apart from his busy and fortunate life that he had nothing to connect it with. When he tried to remember, there were certain images that came to his mind to point to the quality of the event. He did not think of these things on the station platform, but the images came unbidden when he tried to remember, and they were in the direction of what he had felt. There was the image of the Mexican politician lying on the ground, unconscious, while his enemy administered a hypodermic and cut his tongue out. This was something that Laskell had read about in a newspaper in his boyhood in the time of Huerta. There was the image of Chinese torture in which a man was shut in a narrow position in a box and fed at intervals and left to endure like that. This also came from something he had read in his boyhood. And from a newspaper item he had read quite recently there came the image of the man who had spent six days ill in his automobile in a thickly populated street in New Haven, able only now and then to ask children to fetch him water; the children had not spoken of his plight, and he lay there unable to move until on the sixth day a woman noticed him.

  It could not have lasted long, although it was not commensurate with time. Perhaps it subsided almost immedi
ately it reached its climax. Laskell sat there, sweating and trembling, but able now to find a difference between his mind and his terror. Then he was able to look at the fear with a curiosity that was horrified but nevertheless an act of intelligence, and then able to think about the incongruity of this happening to him, a man so much in control of his life. At last he was able to ask himself, strictly and with an educated man’s knowledge of the devious craft of the mind’s unreasoning parts, what effect his weeks in bed could have had that, like an infant deserted, he had been overwhelmed by hysteria because the Crooms, for some reason they could not help, had not met him.

  The man at the filling station did not know of the Crooms. But then Laskell remembered the name of Folger, and the man recalled that the Crooms were the summer people who had bought the place up the hill from the Folgers. It was not more than seven miles and he was willing enough to taxi Laskell.

  There was certainly nothing lacking in the intensity of the Crooms’ distress when they saw John Laskell drive up with a stranger. They were out on the road, waiting, so anxious were they about their friend’s lateness. Arthur paid the driver before Laskell could do anything about it and Nancy kissed him fondly on the cheek and said, “I’m terribly sorry, John dear. Are you all right?” She took Laskell’s hand and led him to a long chair in a shady place.

  There was a pitcher of lemonade, all dewy with the chunks of ice in it, and Nancy at once poured him a large glass and made him put his feet up on the footrest of the deck chair. She was wearing a long house-coat of delicately printed cotton, but the hand that emerged from the sleeve as she poured the lemonade was strong and brown. Nancy was not exactly a pretty girl, but she was remarkably good-looking in a modern way, with her clear eyes that showed a child’s wonder but could also show a child’s strong, demanding anger. Her pregnancy, about which she had written him, was not yet apparent and she was slim and supple.

  Laskell took the glass and sipped the lemonade. He had stopped trembling and sweating before taking the taxi, before he had even gone to inquire about the taxi. But he still felt deeply shaken, as if his emotions were not quite in their accustomed places. But they would soon be put to rights in the company of his friends. He hoped there were no betraying signs, in his manner, of the terror he had experienced.

  He looked around him, at the house, which was a small but very sturdy clapboard house, at the lawn that lay between the house and the road, at the remarkably fine maples that bordered the road and cast their shade over lawn and house, a shade so thick that it kept the lawn rather sparse and mossy. He made a gesture with his glass to include all the Crooms’ little domain and said, “Nice!”

  Arthur came up carrying Laskell’s luggage from the road. “Damn that Duck!” Arthur said. “I’ll wring his neck for him when I see him.” And he stood there in anger, still holding the two bags, the rod and the creel.

  Nancy said to Laskell, “He’s the man who works for us. We let him take the car to Hartford this morning. He was supposed to get back here in time for us to meet you. And we arranged that if he couldn’t do that he was to pick you up at the station himself. He had plenty of time, but he’s so unreliable.”

  She turned to her husband. “Really, Arthur, Duck just can’t be trusted. Imagine letting John wait there at the station, in that broiling sun! And he’s been so ill. John, you look so pale. And they cut your hair all off.”

  “It’s all right,” Laskell said. “No harm done.”

  Here was the shade of the maples, and the glass of lemonade, and his friends. He would rather not think of the moment when the vertigo of fear had reached its climax. After all, it had passed. And for what that moment contained he could blame no one. What that moment contained was given by life itself or by the mind itself. Certainly he did not want, merely in order to fix “blame,” to have to hold in his mind a terror that was greater than any terror of death could ever be. After all, it had passed. He had come to himself and found the man with the car who had agreed to drive him to the Crooms’. And at the Crooms’ he now was, perfectly safe. Already the experience seemed to be receding from reality. He was glad that it was not Nancy and Arthur who had failed him, that the “blame” rested with someone so unrelated and anonymous as this odd-job man, Duck.

  “Are you all right, John?” Arthur asked, still holding the luggage.

  “Oh, perfectly.” Laskell made it as final as he could.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Arthur said. His face was miserable at there being nothing he could do about what had happened.

  “Forget it,” said Laskell.

  Arthur set down the suitcases and leaned the rod against one of them. “It’s my fault really.”

  It was exactly what Laskell did not want to consider. Best to drop the whole matter of fault and blame, else he would have to ask why the Crooms had lent the car for Duck’s Hartford trip on this particular day.

  “I should have known better than to let Duck take the car,” Arthur said. “He’s a wonderful workman, you should see the fireplace he built for us, but he’s quite unreliable. He promised me faithfully that he’d pick you up himself.” He said to Nancy in mournful speculation, “I suppose he got drunk.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Nancy said, equally gloomy. She shook her head unhappily. “It isn’t that he drinks much,” she said to Laskell, “but he’s so easily affected by it. It must be a physiological weakness, something constitutional. Two glasses of ale and he’s not himself. He drinks ale. It’s really been the ruin of him, he could have amounted to a great deal.” She contemplated the ruin of Duck, frowning sadly. “Of course,” she mused, “he’s very unhappy.”

  Laskell noted a brooding solicitude for Duck which seemed to him inappropriate. If he did not want to see blame attached to anyone, neither did he want what this Duck had done—since it was Duck who had done it—to be passed over or explained away by a constitutional weakness or by his unhappiness.

  He was now feeling nothing more than a physical disorientation—he did not quite know whether the east was on his left hand or his right, or before or behind him. He no longer had any fear, but he felt a delicate emptiness, as if all his knowledge of himself had been evacuated. It would fill up, this emptiness. It would be helped to fill up if things were kept quite clear—if, for example, it were understood that Duck had been quite simply at fault, if he were regarded not with this commiseration but with a simple suitable anger.

  “Here’s Micky,” Arthur said.

  The child was approaching uncertainly but gamely. The last time Laskell had seen him he had been toddling: it was a great advance. He lurched toward Laskell with large curious eyes. A young girl walked behind him, very pale, presumably in charge of him.

  “John’s tired—he doesn’t have to bother with Micky now,” Nancy said.

  But Laskell leaned forward in his chair and said, “Hello, Mick!” and held out his hands for the child.

  Micky looked at the guest and let out a long gurgling crow, which could scarcely have been of real recognition but might have been of pleasure, and then tacked sharply to the right. He looked at Laskell with a coquettish doubt and then came running, shoulders back and belly out. When he got within a few feet, he pulled up sharply and then suddenly doubled over. It was as though he were making a bow of great significance, and its suddenness made it comically like one of those bows that one character in a Dostoevsky novel makes to another in recognition of his crisis. But Micky had only gone down to pick up a large moldy maple leaf, and this he held out to Laskell at full stretch. He took a few tentative steps forward, still holding the leaf as far out as possible from himself.

  It was a gift, and Laskell leaned forward to accept it. But the nursemaid now came from behind, caught the child’s wrist firmly, removed the leaf and scrubbed his palm with her clean handkerchief. The little boy thrust out his lower lip. Nancy said quietly, “He may have it, Eunice,” and offered him another leaf, a fresh green one. Micky took it, looked at it, and dropped it. He abandoned his in
tentions and moved off to play with the handles of the suitcases.

  Nancy took Eunice’s arm and presented her to Laskell. “This is Eunice Folger, John. You’re going to stay with her mother and father.” To the girl she said, “This is Mr. Laskell, Eunice.” The girl, who was about eighteen, smiled wanly and looked away. She seemed remote rather than embarrassed. Laskell felt that he was looking at her coldly, but it was only because she did not fit into the place in his mind he had got ready with such speed for the reception of Micky.

  “You’ll love Eunice’s mother and father,” Nancy said. “Won’t he, Eunice?”

  “What?” said Eunice.

  “Love your mother and father. Won’t Mr. Laskell love your mother and father?”

  There was a flicker over Eunice’s face as if she were being teased. Nancy was assuming that she would understand this way of talking—it was the slightly affected make-believe that you were beyond modesty and could be objective about the people and things that belonged to you. But Eunice only looked a little stubborn. Nancy turned from her and said, “You will, John. They’re wonderful.” And as Eunice moved away, Nancy added in an undertone, “The real old stock. You know, Benjamin Franklin had Folger ancestors.”

  Arthur came up and looked down at Laskell with the whole of his fine ugly face. He planted himself before his friend, would not budge until he got the answer he wanted. “John,” he said urgently, “how do you feel? Are you all right? You look pretty pale.”