Trust: A Novel Part 33

"I told you, he's a genius at political things. I know he looks perfectly ordinary, but really he's very smart. He makes everything pay for itself."

"Excellent," said William. "And so do I. Your father's property is worth something."

"It's worth only as much as what can be achieved in using it," she said neatly.

"On the contrary. It's worth what the trustee decides."

"Oh the trustee!" she jeered.

"Myself."

"Ha! You."

"-And if the trustee, on his own responsibility, arranges to dispose of the estate, even temporarily, against the terms by which he is bound," William said slowly, "he ought to have some compensation."

"Oh look! You're not asking for rent?" she said in disgust.

"No."

"Well I don't know what you're asking for. I can't understand that gobbledygook, it's too impersonal. Are you giving us the camp or not?"

"On a condition."

"I thought sol It isn't rent? We can't pay rent, you know. They never would've asked me to ask you if they thought you'd be that materialistic."

"They aren't materialists themselves then?"

"Dialectical materialists. It's different"

"Ah," William said.

"Then what is it? What is it?" she persisted. "You said you want something, and now you won't say what."

"Oh I want something," he remarked vaguely; he was aware of a quick red heat behind his vision; he feared he would stammer. "I want loyalty," he said finally.

"All right, but after all it isn't what you call a betrayal, it isn't being disloyal to my father just because-"

But he interrupted. "I don't mean your father."

"You said loyal-"

"To me."

She gazed. She understood. "To you? What a euphemism! How funny you are, William! You're scared of a few tents!"

He could not speak.

"No free camp, no free love! One or the other! How funny! Is that what you want? A sort of bargain?"

"Put it as you please," he said hoa.r.s.ely.

"But it's a bribe," she cried, humiliating him with an access of laughter.

It was a bribe; he meant to keep her. He looked on her zealousness as some curious erraticism of his own; it was not that he permitted-rather it was that he did not dare to forbid. He meant to keep her. It was a bribe. Yet who was to judge who had succ.u.mbed to whom? He bribed for love, she for zeal: it was a bargain they had struck. The odor of the contract-seal invaded obscurely: as the price of keeping her trustworthy, what would he not have bartered? So he gave in, and gave up-only, he warned, for June and July and August-the dead man's trust.

And in June and July and August the tents went up; and in June and July and August they came, the campers; and in September and October and November they came. And in November the son of Armenian immigrants came, imploring his livelihood; and in January came again; and there, in February, in a morning wind, behind the empty tents beating on poles frozen immobile in die ground, abandoned by the campers who now slept on cots in the house, upstairs and downstairs and along all the narrow corridors, there within earshot of the planning meeting for the Moscow March For A Better Future, the son of Armenian immigrants (whose father and mother had seized the confusion of war to leap like fish from the oppressive fist of Moscow toward the sea's escape) cut the future out of his neck and fell without grace among leaves, rusting their rust with the knife's rust and the special rust of a young man's blood when air has turned it brown as leaves.

The knife was rusty from stem to point. It had lain the whole winter on a stone. All summer they had cleaned fish with that knife. All summer they had fished, and cracked open clams pried from under rocks in the little cove, and every night sang-O illusion of illusion! thought William-with a fine robustness around a campfire. William saw it-the fire-and it smote him like a theory. It was artful, and it was artless, and he supposed it was another of the Youth Leader's contrivances, like the uncaptained cooking committee, everyone taking turns, and then the hideous ma.s.s feeding, like cattle in a bam. But the jolly fire and the jolly songs obscured the meanness of it all-the cots, even in the gate-house, beside which he had to leave the car; and the n.o.ble gate bent, as though it had been swung on for a game; and the road blocked with cartons. He looked into one; it was heavy, and filled with cans of peas for the next day's cooks. Then he heard the singing, and thought it was girls' voices only, because of the lifted thinness, like a light hammer on far far metal; but when he halted in the oak-clump at the top of the hill the sound thickened and mingled with darker sounds, and it was the men who carried the words. So he gave in to the path; it took him sullenly downward toward the shadow-blotted fire, and a whitish smoke that the moon clarified, and a braid of smoke that divided black from black across the water, beginning from the beach and smearing out for the middle of the sea: it was the moon's trail, as liquid-ivory as though pressed that moment from an udder. And meanwhile the singing a.s.saulted the air, imposing joy on the night's heat. A stereotype of illusion! What did Allegra want here? Now gladly she slept in the house, but when her father had asked her to sleep in it she would not; she would not live there; now the house was given away to the mob and she lived in it with the mob. What, what? Why? The song said: "I dreamt I saw Joe Hill last night"; it said: "alive as you and meee"; it said: "I neverrr died, said heee"-and William stopped to see the life of the place, all as Allegra had promised it, but troubled with a plague of falsehood. They had put the fire in the rose-garden: the trellises hung weighty heads by the hundreds, like a gallows. The roses were not for night; they dangled ashamed in the artifice of the camp-fire, and their clots of sweetness fell guiltily and steadily, like a strangely delicious and dangerous gas. On the black lawn the singers had thrown themselves against the dampness, form by form, leg by leg; tangles, it seemed, of lovers; and then, without warning ta the trespa.s.sing eye, torso and head and arms of Allegra-on the margin of the fire, feeding it a stick as though it were a dog that might run with it and return. And the little loops of flame ran with the stick and returned, then ran again; then came tamely, then suddenly reared up barking; and in the tall light that the quick high fire built, William saw the naked back of a Negro, with lean jutting shoulder-blades; and against this Allegra, wearing over her blouse a man's shirt, sat propped, easily and lightly, spine on spine, close close against the man, the thickness of a thread between their two skins. William called her name. She sang and tickled the fire and did not hear. He called her name, but the absurd noise streamed to its climax and overwhelmed him. He felt dumb; he felt deaf. He felt he had fallen in among brigands, vagabonds, gypsies, robbers, beasts; a roiling, lazy, clownish lot of deceivers. And Allegra? Was this what pleased her-to sit chanting on the cold ground of her father's ruined garden like a Hindu on a patch of burlap? She offended him; she outraged him; she insulted him. "Is this it? Is this it?" he said to her, and she, startled, knocked with a knuckle on the brown man's bony back as on a door, to make an opening for him to come. So he came, and sat like the rest of them with his knees in a mound before him, and sat in the middle of their thievish hilarity, and grieved for the spoiled gra.s.s, and the unpruned trellises almost audibly cracking, and the lush waste of rose-heads (his mind ranged them n.o.bly in milk-gla.s.s jars on the window-sills at home, stacked instead with Allegra's abandoned notebooks) : agitatedly he took in how a month of unguarded unruly summer had smothered with jungle his vision of what had been before. Jungle and jungle and jungle: he saw the Negro laugh without circ.u.mspection, and like a savage put pa.s.serine fingers on the round belt of skin inside Allegra's openly hanging sleeve-and she jumping away as though violated: "Hugh, it hurts!" He had forgotten, and pressed her tender sunburn. Brigands, vagabonds, gypsies! A fellowship of savages: but "No," Allegra said, "of philosophers. You don't know how to see us, William." He scowled at her "us"; she left him out. And again he pleaded, "Is this it? So this is it? The air that makes you happy? What you want? And how long will you want it?" "Until I don't want it any more," said his wife. "I won't come again," he told her meditatively. "You said that the time before." "I won't come again, though." "Yes you will. You want to sneak up to see what we do to the property. You don't trust us," she said into his ear, like a secret. It shamed him, the demeaning act: into his ear, as though he were a conspirator, and cared only for the property, and not for his own fate.

Oh, his own fate! It was to stand astride a cleft in the rock; a fault creaking wider by the moment. Quickly he had to choose, or else fall to the limits of vacancy: Allegra solidly on one side, a fresh empty field dn the other. He leaped-his fate leaped, his will leaped, every imaginable force of urgency leaped: for Allegra. It was Allegra he wanted-she who taunted him with wanting nothing at all on the crust of the world. He wanted her, but obscurely altered; he could not say how: to be just as she was, but qualified-the vitality without the mockery, perhaps; the sober stern sureness without the improbable commitment-he did not know. "Oh, there, now they're at it," she said, aroused; "watch them, William, if you came to see sinister rites!"

The Negro yielded another cannonade of laughter to the frosty air. "Who said a bar sinister had any rights?"

"What's a bar sinister?" demanded Allegra.

"A saloon with a bad reputation."

"Oh, Hugh!" she whimpered, faking peevishness. And then: "Is it, William?"

He began feebly, "It's a term of law-"

"Then never mind; don't explain it-you get so long-winded when you start on law, William. Anyhow I don't care. I only care about what has to do with real things that happen, don't I, Hugh?"

"Real things that happen," said Hugh, obligingly. "Virginia reel things."

"What?"

"That's what they're doing."

"No they're not, it's that Highland business."

"They're all the same," said Hugh, "derived from your primitive tribal ancestors. I bet the Virginia reel used to be a rain-dance."

"Oh for Pete's sake! If there's one thing it does in Scotland is rain," Allegra said in disgust. "Sometimes you're so arrogant-my G.o.d, it's insufferable."-Oh, just as she was! Just as she was! The energy of her hauteur charged and charmed. Her malevolence, her spite: they drew William like spells and sparks; like arrows of wind; like a golden collar. She bit, but she gleamed. She was seized with wishfulness. The wishfulness gripped and turned her the way a lathe grips and turns, shaping, shaping. She was incomplete; she was an experiment in search of a potter. Then it was not too late to alter, to qualify; to have her. And meanwhile on the lawn the campers had risen because of the cold, and were rubbing on gra.s.s, and stamping numbly with both feet so that a tremor seemed to muse and loiter in the ground after each blow; and two by two between a column of hand-clappers they bounded and slid; and then all rotated mysteriously, shrieking out a kind of breathlessness that did for a tune: it loosed a barbaric shudder in the trellises.

"Do you do this all the time?" William asked. "Every night?"-because it seemed to him that even the dance was a tool, and had the power to shape and shave, and could lop her awry.

"No-sometimes we do laundry."

"Or pudding," said the Negro.

"We have lots of jobs," Allegra said: with a snap of practicality in her teeth. "Everyone does everything. You just go ahead and do whatever falls to you."

"Ah," said William; he was looking awkwardly for a tone to take. "That's your Equality, I suppose."

"Not quite," said Hugh. "We never really get them equal-some always end up lumpier than others. You meant the puddings? You couldn't have meant the races?"

"Sly! Then you ought to mix the batter harder," Allegra said, performing a culinary frown. "It all depends on how hard you stir."

"You do stir," Hugh said. "You stir me, girl."

"Ball and chain," Allegra said. "Beware."

"Who?"

"Him."

"Is that the one!"

"I told you, didn't I?"

"You didn't tell me. You kicked me. But I guess that's a quibble. I do declare," said Hugh. "I do absolutely declare. Do you duel?"

"I beg your pardon?" William said.

"Sir, I ask if you duel. Choose your blades."

"Blades of gra.s.s," Allegra t.i.ttered, chewing one.

"I am in love with your wife," said the Negro.

"You see?" Allegra said helpfully. "Now you've got to kill him, William."

"That's your Justice, I suppose," the Negro said.

"There! That's William to a T," Allegra cried, admiring the other's mimicry. "He's all for the dead hand and things."

"And life, liberty, and the pursuit of property," said Hugh; "add that."

"Oh pooh! Really, is there anyone vainer than a black man? Talk of property!" Allegra said. "n.o.body's pursuing you any more."

"That's what you think, girl. Enoch is."

"Is he? What'd you do?"

"It's what I didn't do. Sin of omission. Those notes on the Scandinavian organizations I promised him."

"Haven't you sent for them yet!" Allegra marveled. "If it depends on you we'll never get to Moscow. -Lazy and shiftless you are."

"Terrible indolent race, us Swedes," the Negro said. "Here, gimme my shirt to sweat in. That's another reel starting-carries me back to old Virginny, where my old black grand-mammy used to mix a.r.s.enic juleps for the Squire. There was a revolutionary!" He jumped to his feet and offered a slim hand to William. "You want to come, man? You look's though you could use an aeration of the blood vessels. 'Legra won't, she's got the curse."

"Go ahead, William," Allegra urged. "You know how to do it. You can kill him in the do-see-do, when his back is turned. -All right. d.a.m.n it, Hugh, take your filthy shirt."

He plucked it on the fly-"My corpuscles are as white as the next man's, miss"-and swung off into the pack of dancers.

"Hugh's awfully defensive about being educated," Allegra explained.

"Is he?" William said.

"Terribly. Being so defensive is what makes him act that way, sort of self-attacking. You know. It's because he's so defensive."

"Is he educated I meant."

"That's his whole trouble, he's got a Ph.D.-he's older than he looks, lots of their men are. Anyhow he's afraid people will get to thinking on account of the Ph.D. that he's forgotten all about the sharecroppers down South."

"And he hasn't?" William said drily.

"Well look, if he had, he wouldn't've joined the Movement, would he? It's social justice we're after, isn't it?" Indignation lit her; triumph lit her. "And you know what? Hugh's practically the only person in the whole Movement who can write Swedish! At least around here he is, isn't that remarkable?"

"I suppose it immensely increases his value," William murmured. "When the millennium comes the black races will recite the Eddas to the white races."

"Don't be nasty, William. We have lots of correspondence with Stockholm, I told you."

"I thought it was Moscow that was the Mecca," he said; his knees were beginning to ache.

"That doesn't mean we can't have anything to do with the Stockholm groups, does it? We have groups everywhere," she announced positively. "All over the world. Even in South America and Africa. It's because we're against the imperialists. You have to be really international to fight the imperialists."

He sighed. "Allegra."

"Hugh sings in Russian too. But Enoch said his accent's no good."

"I think it's been enough, Allegra. I think you ought to come home," William said.

"I am home."

He could not contradict her. "Then I think you ought to come with me."

"You're not going anywhere."

"And you?"

"I'm going everywhere!"

"It's definite then," he said.

"It's definite about Moscow anyhow. As soon as we got coordinated with that Swedish bunch. Enoch's trying to negotiate a date with them. The Norwegians are O.K., it's just the Swedes, they don't see why people don't like to go North in winter."

"I didn't mean Moscow," he said heavily.

"You asked if it's definite-"

"That this is what you want. This kind of thing." He waved out at the patterns of the reel and the trellises croaking with every thump and the voyaging moon, and meanwhile Allegra shivered; her skin was sleeveless now, and broken out into tiny moles of cold-it was the wind that blew up from the beach, full of sea. "You don't know what you want," William said.

She kneeled forward. Then she stood. "But I know that I want," she told him. "I want and I want and I want and I want."

"I won't come up again."

"You will. I bet you will."