The Middle of the Journey Page 5

  It was the Crooms who had arranged for Dr. Graf and the nurses, Paine and Miss Debry, that whole significant entourage of his illness. It was the Crooms who had shopped for his extra sheets and pajamas, who had sent the crate of oranges. This was the moment to tell them of their part in his illness, and then of what his illness had been like, with its closeness to death, of what a strange and illuminating experience it had been. He wanted to tell them about it to discharge, not his gratitude—he did not want to discharge that—but his involvement with that long new experience. He wanted, as it were, to lay his near experience of death at the feet of life, to put it at the service of life, and life could have no better representatives than the Crooms. They were standing before him, close together, almost unconsciously letting their shoulders touch, unconsciously aglow from their proximity to each other. More than most people they were committed to life. Their commitment was expressed in their youth, their vigor, their unquestioning attachment to each other, the child they had and the child to come; but it did not stop there, as Laskell knew—it went beyond, expressing itself in their passionate expectation of the future, an expectation that was at once glad and stern, in their troubled but clear sense of other people all over the world, suffering or soon to suffer. Life could not reach further, could not pitch itself higher, than it had in these young Americans.

  They stood there looking down at him in his canvas chair, waiting for him to answer Arthur’s question.

  “I’m really quite well now,” he said. He spoke quietly, for the story that he was beginning was a long one. There was not only the account of his illness, which had elements in it that would not be easy to explain, but also the story of Maxim’s visit. By some logic that Laskell did not wholly understand, the story of Maxim’s visit came as the natural sequence to the story of his illness. He had a kind of pride in being the one person in the world who could give them a really circumstantial account of Maxim’s defection from the Party.

  He said, “I’ve never thanked you, you know, for everything—”

  “Oh, John, don’t be a fool,” Nancy cried passionately. “You had us so frightened there for a while, you were so sick. We thought at one point— Dr. Graf told us that you—”

  She stopped. She had no language for it. But she had indicated the thing and now they all contemplated it. If Laskell had died, it would have been the Crooms’ first immediate experience of death. They were so very young. Sometimes Laskell did not remember the difference of age between himself and the Crooms. At other times he was much aware of it. Now they seemed very young indeed. Actually, as Laskell sometimes reminded himself, there was no such very great difference between them as he was in the habit of thinking. He was thirty-three. Arthur was twenty-eight, Nancy twenty-six.

  Nancy was still trying to say it. “Dr. Graf told us that you almost— He said that you nearly—”

  “Died?” said Laskell helpfully.

  “Yes,” Nancy breathed. She accepted the word that had been supplied to her, yet drew back from it, looking at Laskell almost with a kind of rebuke, as if he had forced her to say more than she intended.

  She made an effort to recoup. “He said that the infection was so virulent that it—that the condition was so far advanced, had progressed so far that—”

  Then she surrendered and seemed with the little gesture of her hand to accept the word that Laskell had suggested. It went against the grain, but she saw that it was hopeless to struggle against it, there was no other word, and she gave up with as much grace as she could muster. She smiled and laid her hand on Laskell’s arm. She said, “It’s wonderful to have you with us here.”

  Her tone was most intense. It was charged with love but it was charged also with finality—she brushed away as unthinkable all the intervening time since she had last seen her friend.

  They were all drawn together into a family by the thought of the danger that Laskell had escaped. The sun was setting, the little New England hills were drowsy. A breeze came up and stirred the trees under which they were sitting. The peace that Laskell felt was not the white empty peace of illness which he had so much loved while it lasted. It was rather the populated, various, living peace of affection and houses, of words and touch. This peace was better than the other. And yet, having known the other, it seemed important, even necessary, to tell about it. But the moment for telling had passed. Nancy’s gratification at his being here and safe had somehow made it impossible for him to tell how he had got here and how he had become safe.

  “Is it lovely to be here with us?” Nancy asked when Laskell seemed to have nothing to say.

  “Lovely,” he answered. And it was. He tried to give himself wholly to the loveliness of being here, to submit to this new and better peace that had been beneficently imposed upon him. He got up from his chair to help dismiss from his mind the sense of disappointed urgency.

  He did not wholly succeed. It was all very well to say that his life of illness was over and very properly over—the fact was that John Laskell had never in his whole life been so happy as during the days he had spent in bed. He had never been so entirely without self-reproach. Some remarkable thing had happened to his mind and will. The perfect peace that resulted had seemed to him to be a kind of virtue and a kind of wisdom. It was this that he would have liked to tell the Crooms about. For example, during the latter part of his time in bed he had been able, for quarter-hours at a time, to stare at a rose that had survived the death of eleven other roses that had been sent to him. For as many days as the rose lasted, Laskell had kept it on a little table near his bed, handy for contemplation. He could become lost in its perfection, watching the strange energy which the rose seemed to have, for it was not static in its beauty, it seemed to be always at work organizing its petals into their perfect relation with each other. Laskell, gazing at it, had known something like desire; but it was a strange desire which wanted nothing, which was its own satisfaction. He had been so very much involved, was so quick to ask for it every morning of the three days it continued to bloom, that his nurse Paine had teased him about it. She had said dryly, “Well, you’re having quite a love affair with that flower.” That had delighted him, it had been so apt; and really, when he had asked Paine to put the rose on the table his voice had been quite shy. Yet what a strange love it was that was satisfied by its own desire and wanted nothing. It puzzled him, but even the puzzle was a happiness—for it was a puzzle that did not need solution and he did not try for one. He rested content with the contentment that this harmless activity gave him, a kind of fullness of being, without any of the nagging interruptions of personality.

  Arthur and Nancy looked at Laskell with a glow of approval for his great good sense in being safe and here. And no doubt that was the main point. The account of how he had become safe and had got here could very well wait. And perhaps he would even find that it could be left out altogether.

  Out on the road the little boy was exploring, Eunice walking behind him with outstretched cautionary hands. Suddenly the child turned to them with a beaming face and let out that strange chortling crow of his. It came so suddenly and with such an ecstasy that they all laughed and Laskell said, “Hurray!” Eunice came from behind and thoroughly wiped the corners of Micky’s mouth with her handkerchief, for a quantity of saliva had come out with his joy. He resisted her, trying to keep something in view on the road, trying to get to it.

  It was a charming sight, so charming as to seem for the moment unreal, the couple that now appeared on the dusty road. Before a tall woman walked a tall girl of about eleven, dressed in a kind of blue romper suit which had been pulled up to the top of her long thighs. She walked alert on fawnlike legs, her head high and conscious. Her light hair had been turned up in a topknot which gave her a somewhat grown-up air. The age of the woman was hard to determine. Her beauty—for at the distance she had a kind of beauty—was that of maturity, but a young maturity. Her bright dress, cut in the “peasant” style which had been popular among the women of the p
ainting colony at Provincetown, showed a firm bosom and strong hips. Her hair was done in a coronet of great yellow braids. Her bare legs were neat and nervous. She carried a heavy pail in each hand, and the weight of the pails on the downgrade of the road made her brace her shoulders and throw her hips forward. The dust of the road rose about her in a golden haze.

  It seemed to Laskell that the pair had the quality that, vaguely and no doubt pointlessly, people have a desire to call Greek. There was water in the pails and Laskell thought of wells at sunset, of sacred serpents, of bread and cheese and honey and milk, of days lived out in growth, fertility, and then gentle decay. And because, if his mind took this direction from the sight of the mother and child, it was inevitable that Demeter and Persephone should be on its path, he thought also of violence and sorrow.

  The woman set down her pails and knelt to talk to Micky, upon whose shoulder the watchful Eunice placed a protective hand. The little girl was chattering to Eunice, her head cocked. She seemed to assume that she was quite as grown-up as Eunice. Perhaps that was why Eunice seemed to be discouraging the conversation, looking off into the distance.

  Nancy got up and started toward the house. “Arthur, show John the house, he’ll want to see it,” she said, “and I’ll put on a dress and then we’ll take John to the Folgers’. Duck can’t be much longer with the car.”

  Laskell would have liked to stay to watch the woman and the girl. They were very bright there in the late sunlight and they engaged his whole mind and rested it. But Nancy was waiting at the door.

  The woman called from the road, “Do you mind if I keep the book a little longer?” She had a pleasant, throaty voice.

  “Don’t have it on your mind, Emily—keep it as long as you like,” Arthur called back.

  “Thank you!” she said. “Just a few days more.”

  “Don’t hurry,” Arthur insisted.

  Nothing in the Crooms’ house was quite finished. There was still carpentry to be done and plastering and all the papering. But already the rooms were arranged for living and bore the mark of life, expressing the Crooms entirely, for they showed Arthur’s interest in comfort and casualness and Nancy’s feeling for elegance and neatness. And looking at the brightness and cheerfulness of the rooms, their compact privacy, Laskell thought how much the great urban housing developments, for all the clear need of them and his own commitment to them, were at best poor makeshifts for the traditional idea of a house, sentimentalized though that had been.

  “Do you like it, John dear?” Nancy came down the stairs buttoning the collar of her dress. “Do you like it very much?”

  She came down into the living-room, bringing into it even more life than it had had before, entering not only into the room but into the special, sexually charged relationship of a young woman with the room she is contriving. She was so full of loving pride in the room and so full of expectation of his approval of it that although Laskell only said, “Very much indeed,” he said it in such direct response to the way she felt and the way she looked that it satisfied her completely.

  “There are so many things to be done,” Nancy said. She frowned. Now that she had received Laskell’s praise, she permitted herself the luxury of being overwhelmed by all the practicality that yet remained to be conquered. “It’s so bare still—no pictures, no books yet. All the books are piled up in stacks in Arthur’s study.”

  But on the table two books stood between a pair of heavy glass blocks. One was Arthur’s book on business cycles, the work that had made his young reputation. The other was Laskell’s own little book, Theories of Housing. They were the only two books in the room and they stood there in that special and almost consecrated way between the cubes of green glass. Laskell was deeply touched that his book, that he himself, should have such a place in the Crooms’ house.

  On the flyleaf of Laskell’s book was written, “To Nancy and Arthur with my dearest love.” When Laskell had written the inscription he had been at first troubled by the thought that it was an excessive sentiment. He had then known the Crooms only two years and he thought that perhaps “dearest love” was too much to express what he felt toward them. He even wondered whether so full an expression of feeling might not be a burden to these young people, a responsibility of emotion that should not be forced on them, though really he forced nothing on them, it had been the Crooms themselves who had first insisted on the friendship. And Laskell had gone so far as to pick up another copy of the book to write a more measured inscription. But with his pen almost on the new flyleaf, his sense of fact asserted itself—like many men, Laskell thought that written words should be very precise in the expression of one’s feelings and he asked himself whether it was not simply and literally true that the Crooms were the people in all the world he loved best. And he had turned the flyleaf and the title page and, on the dedication page, saw the initials E.F. standing alone. He had not been able to put “to the memory of E.F.”; nor even “To E.F.”—the dedication stood only as her initials. If Elizabeth Fuess had been still alive, he would have written a most affectionate inscription in the Crooms’ copy, but not the particular one he had already written. But now there was no Elizabeth, and the simple literal fact was that he gave the best of what love he had to Nancy and Arthur.

  And now he was glad indeed that he had written as he had. It was the mark of their return of his love that he was here now, the Crooms’ first guest in their unfinished house, and that it seemed right to them that his book should stand with Arthur’s between the massive glass blocks.

  “I’m so happy you’re in it,” Nancy said, and took Laskell’s hand. “And next year when you come, we’ll really be able to put you up.”

  A car drew up on the road. “There’s Duck now,” Arthur said. He spoke grimly and went out to deal with the offender. His face was quite stern.

  Nancy watched him go. Then she seized Laskell by the arm and drew him with her to follow Arthur out of the house.

  “Arthur!” she called. Arthur, already halfway across the lawn, turned around. Nancy waited for him to start back toward them, and when he came near enough she said, “Tell him we’re very angry—very angry.”

  Arthur nodded. It was clear that he would tell Duck something about his anger but that he would not be very angry. Nancy’s injunction had made real anger impossible.

  “He’s a scoundrel,” Nancy confided to Laskell. There was a touch of modest pride in her voice. “A dreadful scoundrel. But he is so real—just as real as Emily is unreal. That’s the woman you just saw on the road.”

  “Are they connected with each other?” Laskell asked.

  “Oh, they’re married,” said Nancy, as if he should have known. “Emily came here one summer and she made him marry her after he got her pregnant. He comes from around here, his family were among the first settlers. It seems there was an awful scandal with Emily. She was a distant relative of Miss Walker—Miss Walker is an old Boston lady who has a lovely house over that way.” And Nancy waved into the unspecified distance. “I guess she had some kind of Lady Chatterley business in mind; Duck does have a kind of gamekeeper look. But that was before the book, of course. She was a schoolteacher with advanced ideas, or maybe a librarian, I forget. They’re very poor and they live in a remodeled tool house just down at the corner of the road. Duck made it. You’ll see it on the way to the Folgers’. Goodness!” she concluded breathlessly, “how much gossip I’ve picked up in these weeks.” And she stood there, a confessed gossip, her eyes shining with the pleasure of it.

  Duck had got out of the car and stood with a foot on the running board. He was a dark, slim, compact man. He was talking easily, looking down at his foot on the running board and then suddenly up at Arthur, as if making swift decisive points after close thought. From the distance Laskell could see that some of his teeth were missing. This did not keep him from smiling easily. At last he took his departure down the hill. He waved to Nancy as he went and Nancy waved back.

  Arthur, as he walked toward them
, shrugged his shoulders in humorous defeat. “What’s there to do with him?” he said. “He says they told him at the station that the train would be half an hour late.”

  Nancy said primly, “I hope that at least you didn’t let him think you believed that?”

  “No. But what can you possibly do with Duck? He lies so elegantly. And as Emily likes to say about people, he’s not so much immoral as amoral.”

  It was as if they were talking about a young poet of their acquaintance whose gifts excused such faults as coming much too late to dinner.

  Arthur put the bags into the back of the car and they all three got in the front. Just as they were about to start, Nancy spied Laskell’s rod and creel on the grass. “Oh, your fishing things,” she cried, “you’ve left them!”

  “Leave them for now,” he said.

  Where the Crooms’ steep dirt road turned off to the asphalt road, Nancy said, “There’s the Caldwell place I was telling you about.” And Laskell had a glimpse of a tiny structure like a playhouse built for a child, curious in shape and very gay with red and green paint. He saw bright window sashes and bright curtains and a patch of flowers which must have been difficult to grow, for the soil around the house was virtually all sand.

  “Duck built it, but the color scheme is Emily’s. You’ll have to be on the lookout for her when you walk to see us—she’s the waylaying kind. There’s the church!”

  It was New England white, with a rather short steeple, not a very distinguished church.

  “Handsome,” said Laskell, responding to Nancy’s local pride.

  Then in a moment they were at the Folgers’ place.

  It was a large house on a broad clean lawn, a most attractive house, square and firm-set. There was a graceful doorway at the front, but no path led up to it. Arthur turned into the driveway alongside the long, low, unrailed porch, and it was obvious that all life came and went by the side door.