Boys and Girls Come Out to Play (38 page)

“Read the letter please, Max.”

“I
am
reading: why get all worked up?” Divver spread out the pages and smiled at once. “When I see that address at the top, like a voice from another planet; very strange … I think if it weren’t for such reminders, plus, of course, the daily news, I would scarcely remember that I have another life in another continent.”

“You talk as if you were never going back to it,” said Morgan, looking bitterly and curiously at Divver. But he quickly cursed himself for having interrupted, because Divver promptly took him up, nodding solemnly and saying: “That’s not so impossible as you seem to suppose. As a matter of fact, I’ve gradually become quite fond of this cheap little clip-joint.” He looked out amiably over the roofs. “I get up early, I do a good day’s work, I go to bed and to sleep—
really
sleep; no nembuthol—and I do it all with a clear conscience, a way I never did on any other trip. But what gets me is the
freedom
of it: I never have to believe that any time I say what I feel I’m betraying the Common Man; there’s no one reminding
me day and night that I am just a part of one great globe, that I have a duty to millions of starving Chinese and must free India. When I turn a corner I don’t invariably see a sign saying ‘How
You
Can Help’; when I enjoy myself I don’t have to remember that there are people in concentration camps.” He became heated and continued: “I don’t have to feel that because I went to college and make a good salary I am not fit to wash the feet of a shoeshine boy; and if I am glad—which I am—that I was born white and not black, I don’t rush to lie on a board of nails. When I turn on the radio, I don’t hear a squeaky little voice saying ‘The meeting will come to order, please,’ and know that this is the 271st debate on how to safeguard democracy by the Lincoln Nursery School. Here, there are no sadistic professors to assure me gleefully that each time someone is killed by a firing squad it is I who did the shooting and I who was shot. Here, I feel no duty to spend every moment adjusting to a pack of wolves—to underprivileged people who never gave
me
a thought, psychiatrists who want to make-me-or-break-me back to ‘normal,’ lovers of tolerance who will make a good international citizen of me even if they have to hug me to death. Why should I go back to that perfectionists’ rat-race, that nation of indomitable professors, when I am doing just as much good away from it, and when I have
real
freedom: freedom from Marx, freedom from Freud, from Jews, from Shick and Dick—why, I feel as free as a proletarian, as happy as an underprivileged. And believe me, I am a hell of a lot better for the change, and so would every American be—far more tolerant if he was free to have some prejudices, to shrug his shoulders over the sufferings of others, to be selfish when he wanted to be, to have all that ‘good’
pressure
off him a few days a week: then people could relax and you might have the beginnings of some sort of real affection. Why, do you know: after a few more years of democracy and toleration, we’ll be a nation of suppressed fiends,
equalitarians with screaming-meemies. We’ll live under a ruling-class of social-workers—can you imagine a more terrifying prospect? Just think: all over a whole continent, luncheon-speakers rising daily to spout the latest duty at $3.50 a plate, the bards in the banquet hall crooning the ancient lectures of mythical dialecticians, statisticians broadcasting analytical Christmas messages of social conscience … Whew? Now
I’
m
all worked up … But I’m not just dreaming aloud. I really mean what I say about staying. If Larry moves on to another job, I shall go with him, if he makes no objection. I don’t know how the
money
question would be solved, but that’s in the future; Larry and I have scarcely discussed it. My future now depends on him, naturally; and he’s being left up in the air by that lousy Ministry himself … Now your letter; excuse me for being so verbose; I just exploded.”

He went to reading, and gradually his expression became thoughtful and stern. When he came to the end he was plainly annoyed; he paced around for a few moments as though he were irritated by the letter’s invasion of his new life. At last, he said: “Of course, she’s dead right: you realize that, don’t you?”

Morgan turned pale.

“Well, isn’t she?”

“She may be right in her way, not in mine.”

“Oh, come! You don’t have to complicate the question with Jesuitical subtleties.”

“There’s no subtleties; there’s only what I want. And I didn’t think that
you
would …”

“… after all, what do
you
care? You’ve had yourself a trip, you’ve seen the world; and it’s not as if you were doing any
good
here. You’re at a rebellious age: we’ve all been: it’s an automatic reflex at eighteen. No, you go home: you’re not at an age to wander around footloose. Go through college like anyone else, and then do what you spoke of doing: get a job
on
Forward;
start as an assistant-editor: you’ll soon work up if you’re serious; your experience here will have opened your eyes to the world; and with your particular talents—which I wish I had had myself—you could well become literary editor in five or ten years, if you do some serious critical work or poems, etc. Just because that life strikes me, at my age, as a sort of social malaise, there’s no reason why
you
should snoot it. You should find out about it for yourself, not through me.”

Morgan plucked up his courage, there being nothing else to pluck up; he looked Divver waveringly in the eye and said: “I was going to say that I didn’t think you would take her side after all you have admitted to me not only about social things, but
personal
ones; about how you felt about your wife, and what the word home suggests to you.”

But Divver, instead of murdering him with his bare hands, didn’t stir a muscle. He only said drily: “I don’t think I know what you are driving at. Do you mind saying all that over again?”

“Yes, I do mind, because since you agree with my mother, what does it matter? All I meant was: you seem to think it’s O.K. for you to get away and have a good time, but when it comes to me, you at once think the opposite.”

“Just what do you mean by ‘having a good time,’ may I ask?”

“I mean, you are enjoying yourself. You are happy, and you want things to go on the same way indefinitely. So do I.”

“I see. Then let’s break the various factors down somewhat, so we can see them more objectively.” Divver coolly raised his fingers and began to tick them off. “First: I am not God. Second: I have admitted certain things about my private problems and my subconscious. Third: I have taken on, in addition to my regular work, a job that seems to me to have great social importance. I am not being paid a cent for it, incidentally. Fourth: I am getting a great deal of contentment
—‘enjoyment,’ being ‘happy,’ to use your words—out of this extra work and the fundamental knowledge it is bringing me. You seem to think, however, that you have a right to roll around in bars to your heart’s content, but that
I
may not get any pleasure from the way of life that
I
have chosen. In fact, you seem to think it my duty to encourage you, as your mother so rightly puts it, to dream in the Polish Corridor until Hitler wakes you up. Is this a correct summing-up, or has something escaped my dull wits?”

By now Divver was red and angry, so much so that Morgan’s courage collapsed. They stared at each other in silence and mutual hate, breathing heavily.

“You are not the first person I have met,” Divver said at last, coldly rising to his feet and adjusting his bathrobe, “who has assumed a sympathetic attitude when I have confided in him: and then, at some later time convenient to him, has tried to use my confessed sense of guilt as a weapon against me. And now, will you kindly go to your own room and leave me to
enjoy
myself. Some day, when you have done some more thinking on the subject, we could continue the discussion on a higher plane. Meantime, I should advise you to look over the sailing-lists and answer your mother with a cable.”

After Morgan had been alone in his room for a few minutes Divver put his head in and said, in an even colder voice: “You may not know it, but it is not my intention to sit down instantly and inform your mother of the line you are taking. I happen to respect another person’s confidences, even when I am responsible for that person and in danger of getting involved in his neurotic behaviour. So I shall make-believe to have no connection with either you or your problems, until you have voluntarily picked your sailing-date. Or until your mother writes directly to me for help, which I hope is something that a little intelligent thinking on your part will prevent.” He withdrew.

Morgan immediately left his room. In the lobby he paused at
the desk, showed the clerk the undertaker’s card and asked: “Is he by any chance still here?” “Oh, no, sir; he took the morning train.” “I just thought he might possibly have changed his plans.” “That is often the case, sir; but not this time. I remember the gentleman very well; he carried a physician’s bag.”

Morgan went on to the Baron’s Hall and ordered dinner. He was astonished by his calm and self-possession. With something like disdain he reflected on various facts: that he had not a single friend in the world now, that the bar was open if he wanted to get blind-drunk for the first time. But the only vision that excited him was Divver’s furious red face; he repeated his few brave words to Divver over and over; and although he was sorry now that he had not said more, he felt proud of having at last slung a pebble against a man, not a mother: he was brave enough even to admit how thankful he was to have escaped unhurt. And as to the future: why struggle with that right now? I have enough money to go and live in another hotel for a long time. I can go to Tutin if I choose, to Norway, even to Paris, by God!

He also knew something else which both pleased and frightened him. From now on Divver would reckon him an enemy, not an innocent boy, and would find other ears for his monstrous confessions. When he went upstairs to bed he wondered if Divver realized this as sharply as he; but no answer, no sound came from the other room.

*

It was pitch dark when he woke up with a puff of relief. He had dreamt that he was having a seizure, and that a ring of people, of which somehow he was one, looked down on his convulsions in a dispassionate way and agreed that they would soon pass: he was pleased that everyone should be so calm and sensible, but at the same time he wondered if they were not
carrying it a bit too far; and he felt resentful…. His quarrel with Divver poured back into his mind, and vaguely, like one of two dozing lovers extending a toe to make sure of the other, he said to himself: there was something in my life that made everything hopeful; what was it?: oh yes,
courage.
He looked into the darkness and confessed: it doesn’t seem like much of a discovery any more. Depressed by this, by his dream and by the preceding evening, he looked toward the invisible window of his room, thinking: it will soon be morning. This ordinary thought persisted, until he wondered: what is so interesting about the morning?—of course, that is when a seizure hits me, if at all. This well-known fact
did
seem like a discovery, though he could not tell why. He remembered that the morning hours had often troubled his mother, but that they had never troubled him. He found himself thinking: I may have one tomorrow when I wake up. Suddenly he felt afraid.

He thought of where the seizure might take place: when he was in bed, when he was in the bath, when he was dressing, when he was having breakfast, when Mr. Plezeck was reading the newspapers. But I shall never see Mr. Plezeck again, he remembered: he’ll be reading to Max in the other room. And after that Max will go away to the mines, and I shall be left alone again.

He was still frightened and perplexed. He couldn’t understand why, after so many years of careless nights, he should haunt himself with the morning. He remembered that his mother’s morning fear had been shared to some extent by Rosa, by the cook, even by his grandfather: the whole household now seemed to him to have arisen in a state of extreme fear. But, he thought,
I
was always calm; I was often praised for my—yes, for my
courage.
They had the anxiety: I had the seizure: surely it was a fair division? Don’t tell me that now, because I am alone, I am going to have the terror as well as the seizure, the fear as well as the courage? Why, that would make it seem
as though up to now I had never really had anything to be courageous about—almost that
they
had been the brave ones and I the coward; because there is nothing very brave about not feeling afraid.

He hoped that now that he had examined the novelty of his fear it would disappear: he was feeling tired. But his next thought was how dreadful it would be if, night after night, he should be able to sleep only long enough to refresh his capacity for fear.

This seemed too morbid; he was ashamed, and started firmly to reason with himself, to scrutinize his apprehensions from every angle; and soon, that most comforting mental activity, a man’s ardent pursuit of his own fleeing footprints, thoroughly distracted him from the fear that had caused it. Absorbed, he was doing his best to recall, with scrupulous honesty, some shameful act which he had performed during a children’s party at the age of four and a half, when there was a bump in the next room, and Divver’s typewriter burst into action.

He looked at his watch: it was past three o’clock. Had it taken Divver all this time to control his anger and recover his hypocrisy, or had he been silently working with a pencil? Whichever the case, the sound of the typewriter was friendly and cheering: I may, Morgan thought with dignity, be grateful to the machine and still despise the man.

Soon he heard another sound. Divver was humming as he worked, humming and typing in an easy rhythm—because he knows, Morgan thought instantly, that soon
his
chore will be done and when
his
morning comes it will take
him
back to paradise. Oh! What a so-and-so—to wake decent, responsible citizens with the clatter of his escape: will no one lodge a complaint with the manager?