Barbary Shore (26 page)

She shrugged and made no further response.

“Tell me,” I went on, “was it as part of your duties, part of earning your salary, that you have followed Guinevere and spied on me and read that note?”

Her face was expressionless. She gave no evidence of having heard me.

“Lannie, why were you listening outside the door?”

“For myself, myself alone,” she muttered. The sound of her voice must have opened echoes to my question, for she picked up the empty whiskey tumbler and then dropped it nervelessly in her lap.

“They went out together, didn’t they?” Lannie asked.

I nodded.

“Oh, she’s a bitch, she’s a bitch, she’s such a bitch.” And Lannie sat looking at me, her face grown pale from the war she suffered, all her feelings, all her pain, seemingly concentrated into the white splotch of powder upon her face.

“A bitch,” Lannie repeated, “and that I was not prepared for.”

I
F GREATNESS
is thrust upon certain men, thought is extorted from others. How apt that I who had no past and so eschewed a future, who entered neither social nor economic relations, who was without memory and henceforth privileged not to reason, should have struggled again with ideas which were not my own, that I had learned upon a time and then ignored. The paraphernalia of study, the lessons absorbed, the definitions learned and then employed, came trooping back.

I sat down and reviewed the primer. The worker sells his labor-power, and in the time he labors he creates products whose value is greater than his wage. And on the seventh day, the laborer resting, the capitalist can compute his gain, consume a portion of the take, and search for a place to invest what remains. This was Genesis in what had been my Bible, and from there one could make a voyage of two thousand pages and what other endless books, on through the history of three hundred years, while along the horizon the factories grew, the railroads were laid, the cities expanded, even into the twilight and the falling rate of love.

I contested with equations and relations. There is the worker and the machine, and as the machine grows larger the man diminishes until one can hear from the background the funereal hymn of the falling rate with the sense it gives that what
is born must die and yet grows larger before it expires. To such music the hunted had given chase while the machines which pinched their rate of gain drove them out across the world. The laborer and the machine, the wage of one to the cost of the other, the variable capital to the constant, and how the one decreased as the other swelled, how the men from whom the profit must be stolen became so small in proportion to the machines that yielded none at all. Across the world they searched, the men who owned the factories, for the tin can must absorb its cost and present its dividend, and the natives of a hundred colonies and dependencies had, ergo, to be plucked from their holes and thrust into cells.

Moneybags, the haunted, for the surplus product once stolen, must be reinvested. And if surplus value had been the source of their capacity for expansion, it became as well the root of their destruction. I sat, I thought, and what I could not remember, I was obliged to reconstruct. I pondered the intricacies I could manage, and juggled the law of value against the practice of monopoly, groped through the techniques of the trust to understand again why production was limited and prices made artificial, how the living standard of half of mankind could not rise, for if it did where would monopoly find Peter to rob and pay the Paul? I sloughed through a gold standard I had rarely grasped and slashed the knot of tariffs until, my head aching, I could seize the contradiction and understand how at the moment industrial techniques were ready to supply the world, the world market was in the process of being destroyed.

I traced how they moved, cheating and colliding through every country of the globe, while as an instrument of necessity—and they called it policy—the armies grew and the armaments were piled. I mulled the history of that first war which ended probably before I was born, and the second which had swallowed me, and the third which was preparing. The man grew smaller and the machine grew larger, the horizon was broken by new
factories and new ones upon them, and all the while the creation of products that men could use became less year by year. For there was a new consumer and new commodities, and every shell could find as customer its enemy soldier. That market could never be glutted; it furnished new blood for the thickening of the old, enabled millions to be employed and other millions to be put into uniform. No longer the need would exist to search for reinvestment and be haunted by surplus value. I scratched my hand and knew with sour mirth, for I owned so much, that this was the last year in my time when men, if they had the money, could buy without thought whatever they wished. In nostalgia this year would be remembered.

Moneybags, my classical moneybags, would bewail it with the rest, for he was as weak as I and knew it in his heart, knew it from the bottom of all his newspapers, knew the naught in the eyes of all his men who said yes, knew it in the power of the bureaucrats he abused. He was going out and they were coming in. With every check he received from the republic, with every carload he sent to its arsenals, he was making himself smaller and making them larger. Oh, he had life yet, life enough for a year or two of war and even longer, but the end was coming. The days approached when the worker would be paid less and obliged to work more, and to accomplish such magic only a government that spoke in the name of the worker could suffice. What for moneybags but to cry his sour resignation? Small prize for him to know that the new leaders would have their profit, that the state as capitalist would buy the labor-power of all and dispense it back again with high wages for the few and low for the many. Small glee for him to cry that the new democracy had the freedom of an army and the equality of a church. No one would be listening. For he had planted the rot and now screamed at the weeds. There was the enemy, the progressively unspeakable, unmitigable, irredeemable and damned enemy; the weeds; the mirror to the future. The monopole had been closed to the
enemy, they had been necessary Peter to feed the Paul, squeezed beneath so they could never rise, but now suddenly they were gone, they were the enemy, birthed from the wars monopoly had begun and they were driven to finish. They held the mirror and prophesied the future; the winner would be distinguishable by a mote from the one who lost.

I thought of the workers who would support the bastard inheritors of what was no longer a social revolution. The standard of living would be raised the promises stated, raised to the weight of a pork chop and taken back again. Their party which came to power the workers would think, and discover that the state was not their instrument but their master. An association of free producers and free consumers they once had demanded, and now would exist in a wage-relation to the party and to the state. The international co-operation of the nations they had sung, and one-half of the world would fight the other. Socialist freedom, the greatest conception of freedom, and for substitute they would be granted the enslavement of regimented labor, the saturation of the working-class mind to propaganda until even the mating bed became a duty. There had been a heritage but it was given away, and the labor boss, the hack, and the Fabian devoured it among themselves. Moneybags would die, but not by the ax; slowly he would perish and of his own contradictions, simmering away in the wars he had cooked with their juice as sauce. That way it would come, or thus I saw it, and the armies of the swindled would bleed each other for slogans that became ever more similar.

What could follow? There the questions I answered were fewer than the questions I began, and if I had thought to reply to Lannie, I quit in fear I should listen to the echo. Thought may have been extorted from me but I ended by clutching it back, and sat as motionless with my body as I was moveless with my brain.

An hour passed and I mused, throwing pebbles into the
mind’s pool until the circles spread so wide that form was lost. I must have been in stupor.

How long I might have continued, I do not know, for I was interrupted. Hollingsworth came to my door, and with a greeting that was almost friendly, told me that the conversation he conducted with McLeod was to be continued, and indeed the business if it were not improper to call it that, or so he went on, was to commence in fifteen minutes. He hoped I might find it possible to attend.

I found it more than possible. As if I had been waiting for just such an opportunity, I crossed the hall and was there the first, sat in the empty room until he and Lannie, and McLeod almost upon their steps, came to join me. We resumed our previous positions, we looked at one another, McLeod facing him across the table, Lannie between them, while I perched on the bed.

“I wonder,” Hollingsworth began, “if you have come to a favorable decision on my offer?” and expectorated neatly into his handkerchief.

McLeod shrugged, while in the interval, Hollingsworth arranged papers on the desk. “It’s an unreal offer. You furnish no explanations how I would be protected.” Time passed slowly, and with a start I forced myself to concentrate. “In any event,” McLeod went on, “I have made up my mind. I do not accept your bargain.”

The pencil was tapping. “Fine.” Hollingsworth made a mark on a piece of paper. “In that case, I think it is time to go into details.” He looked at Lannie who was slumped into her chair and seemed half asleep. “Is there anything I can provide for you, Miss Madison? Cigarettes?” the irony in his voice betraying anger.

Lannie started at the interruption and raised her eyes. She was haggard, more haggard even than I had left her. When she spoke her voice was husky, nerves wrangled by this interruption.
“No, no thank you, nothing,” she said, looking about her guiltily, and by an effort she settled back into the chair, but she was hardly at ease. To each abrupt gesture one of them might make, she responded with the quiver of a finger, or the blinking of her eye.

Hollingsworth picked up a typewritten sheet. “Details, then,” he sighed. “Would you mind telling me how you came to join the organization I work for?”

This question which could not have startled me more, was expected apparently by McLeod. Yet his hand, involuntarily I may suppose, had come up to the breast pocket of his shirt, and he was playing with the flap as though once again Hollingsworth had handed him a paper he wished to conceal. “There’s no point in going into it,” he said at last. “You know everything about that subject.”

“Permit me my methods,” Hollingsworth almost whispered.

McLeod could only shrug again. “The story is simple enough,” he said briskly. “I knew that if I remained in my old position any longer, I would be brought to trial, and it would be m’neck. There was a certain military pact completed at the time, which I found impossible to support. I had said not a word to anyone, but there are ways of knowing when one is in disfavor, and I had knowledge that I was to be publicly attacked by a high official. Therefore, having a moderate desire to live, or so I told myself, I made inquiries, and was told I could recover my passport to this country, if …” Here, he paused. “If I would go to work for your organization. The price for my papers was a detailed list of information about specific events and personalities in the land across the sea. Upon due consideration I decided to furnish it.”

A sneer had come on Lannie’s mouth. She laughed hysterically.

“So I worked,” McLeod went on stiffly. “After a time they even gave me a desk and a secretary.”

Hollingsworth permitted himself a joke. “A fellow has to admit you were a kind of statistician.”

“Is it necessary to discuss this any further?” McLeod asked.

Hollingsworth clicked his tongue. “Not if we can come to some agreement about the … little object.”

“I don’t have it,” McLeod muttered.

“Well, we’ll see about that.” Hollingsworth sighed and looked at the ceiling. “How to continue?” He pulled a piece of paper toward himself as though he were selecting a card from a deck, and giving a show of reading it, he nodded his head and made small affirmative sounds. “Yes. Yes. This will do.” He adjusted his tie.

“Would you care,” he asked formally, “to explain why you left us? You will remember that you disappeared without a trace.”

McLeod examined his knuckle. “I had come to the conclusion that I was destroyed as a person.” By the slightest inclination in my direction I sensed that he was talking at least as much for me as for Hollingsworth. “I was obliged to take up a wholly new existence. You see after a decade of acts which have undermined one’s revolutionary fiber, there is only one act which still possesses meaning—to save one’s life. But to save it in the name of what? I had never until then considered my life important in itself. And this tormented me when I joined your friends.” McLeod carefully traced his tongue over the outline of his lips as though to assure himself they were still there. “No need to specify the various crises, mental, moral, and even physical, which I experienced. I need only state that having once understood my situation, I determined to make a clean break.”

“And you disappeared?”

“Precisely.”

“You didn’t take the little object at the time of your departure?”

“No.”

“It was discovered missing,” Hollingsworth reminded him.

“Coincidences may often plague one.”

Hollingsworth nodded politely. “In other words, you just devoted yourself to doing new radical and revolutionary work, but on a small scale.”

McLeod shook his head. “I devoted myself to nothing. I have merely floundered since then, and have indulged in no political activity whatsoever.”

“Oh, you must think I’m completely stupid,” Hollingsworth exclaimed. He drew a clipping toward him:

Hollingsworth read with difficulty, moving his mouth in preparation for each long word like a schoolboy thrust into a text beyond his means: