Departure (14 page)

“He asked the jeep to call for us at half past ten,” the sergeant explained.

It was a good evening for them too, I think. Charjee shrugged it away.

“Stay and you will have curry with us, and then you can find a rickshaw.”

I shook my head slightly, and the sergeant, glancing sidewise at me, explained that his friend did not ride in rickshaws.

“No? Never?”

Hurley smiled bitterly. The trade-union men looked at each other patiently.

“Could I ask why your friend doesn't ride in rickshaws?” Charjee said politely.

The sergeant explained that I had principles. I felt uncomfortable, because while they were a gentle people, nevertheless men drew them like beasts.

“Principles are fine things to have,” Charjee said, “and I respect them.” And the teacher of English added, “So many of the Americans have so many principles.”

“You see,” Hurley said tensely, turning to Charjee, “it isn't so simple with us either.” He seemed terribly anxious to be understood.

“Here, in this room, three months ago, we faced a peculiar problem,” Charjee said to me, “and I wonder how you would have solved it. It was at the height of the famine, as you may remember, the famine which the British made because they felt that a sick and starving folk would be less of a problem in Bengal. Each morning they picked nine or ten hundred dead bodies off the streets of Calcutta. It was a very bad time, believe me. Well, at the time I speak of, four of us were having dinners here in this room, my daughter, myself, Shogar of the Central Trade-Union Council, and Bose, who is District Party Organizer here. It was not a happy dinner; we had a little rice and a little curry—one meal each day. Well, the window was open, and as we began to eat we heard the cries of the hungry.”

“I heard them up the valley,” I said. “There was famine there when I came in.”

Then you know what I mean. The window was open. That is the problem. What would you have done if you were eating dinner here that night?”

“It is not a fair question,” Hurley said, in his incredibly Cockney accent. “You can't lay his principles alongside of yours.”

“I think it's a fair question,” I said. “I think I can answer it truthfully enough. I would have given the poor devils my dinner. That isn't heroic or charitable even; I was conditioned that way. Most Americans are.”

Hurley smiled again, but there was a sadness in him, a lonely sadness that took the sting from his words. “But they become unconditioned so fast, so very fast. How many thousands of your Americans have I seen here in the East, and almost never did I hear one say Indian, or Burmese, or Chinese, but for all people whose skin is one shade darker than theirs, they have one word,
waug.
They are complicated in their principles, just as my Indian friends are.”

“We did not give them our dinner,” Charjee said tiredly, as if the evening had suddenly become very long, too long. “We ate our dinner, and in the morning five dead bodies were on my doorstep, two women and three children.”

Then there was silence. I didn't know what to say, and nobody else spoke until Charjee continued. “We are a few who will help lead India to freedom, and in this last famine in Bengal five million people died. Those five would have died anyway, a day later, two days later. They will die like that until India is free. There is always a price put on freedom, and part of the price we pay is to stay alive.”

Another insect hurtled from the fan to his lap, and without thought he lifted it gently and dropped it to the ground. The sergeant put his hand on my knee and told me:

“You see, Charjee organized the rickshaw drivers. They are a very good union. They are a very militant union. During the past year, they struck three times, and each time they won their gains. They are a very militant union. You see, they haven't much to lose. I mean, the life of a rickshaw driver is only six or eight years after they begin to work, so they haven't much to lose. Some day they will help to do away with rickshaws, but until then—”

The jeep was sounding its horn, and we got up to go. Charjee was afraid he had wounded my feelings—a guest in his house. I must not think that Indians were boors. I must come again, and then we would talk more about literature and he would give me letters to other writers in the States.

“I'll come again,” I said. “If you ask me, I'll come again.”

“You're not angry?” the sergeant said, when we were in the jeep and on our way.

“Who is Hurley?”—thinking that surely I had met him before and noticing how the gall in him had turned into an almost womanly sweetness as he listened to Charjee.

“He is away from home too long,” the sergeant said slowly. “I'm glad I'm not married. He has a wife and two kids and it's four and a half years since he saw them. He is a Communist and was a trade-union leader back home, and they know it, and they keep sending him into Burma and hoping he will be killed.”

“He looks healthy.”

“I think he'll live,” the sergeant said. “The East is very interesting, and if you get used to it, you can stay alive, if you want to enough. Too many people are sensitive about the East.”

The Gentle Virtue

T
HE SERIES OF
lectures which Carrol presented during his two-week stay at the University were more of a success than he had anticipated, considering that the subject was “The Inner Ethic of Herman Melville,” and at the final convocation he drew a crowd of more than seven hundred, a very singular and unprecedented occurrence.

He had to admit to himself that he had not done badly; four years in the service might have cut him entirely adrift, or it might have had the opposite effect of driving him to the close security of an assistant professorship, both shelter and retreat and a certain amount of dignity too; but he had resisted more successfully than some of his colleagues. He had written and published a book, and he was well on his way with the second one now. To go it alone required more courage than anything he had faced during the war, but he had managed and he would manage, and there was not only relief but a wonderful sense of freedom in the thought that tomorrow he would be returning to New York, to the complicated and variegated world where anything could and did happen. The sense of excitement he experienced whenever he undertook even a minor variation in the course of his life was something he would not willingly surrender; and all things taken together he was, he felt, about as happy as a man could be in these troubled and perturbed United States.

The talk to the convocation was delivered freely and wittily, in a fashion that prompted Madelin Burroughs to tell him, afterwards, that he had a voice that could lull children to sleep, and when he had finished, he managed very well with the few words he had to say to each of the many people, students and faculty and some townspeople, who came crowding around him. A year ago, he would have been terrified and embarrassed by their approach, but he had achieved what he liked to think of as a sort maturity in that time, and it gave him real pleasure to know that there were many people who thought well and warmly of Brighton Carrol.

He was the middle of a small circle; some people came up and introduced themselves and plunged directly into what was on their minds; others held back and waited, and some stood there and smiled at him because they liked him and what he said and the way he looked; and there was one young girl who stood on the edge of the circle watching him, and he could hardly help noticing her, she was so lovely and clean looking. When Professor Andrews drew him away to take him to the reception the English faculty was giving him on this, his last night, he felt a sense of regret that he had not had a chance to talk to the pretty girl. That made it all the better when she was there, getting into Andrews' car with him. They squeezed in with a young instructor, and both were introduced casually by Andrews, who, after he had told Carrol that the girl's name was Lucy Reed, bubbled with praise for the convocation.

“You think,” Andrews said; “and you will never know, Brighton, God willing, how rare a quality thought is on a campus.”

“Isn't it a new campus though?” Carrol wanted to know. “Practically everyone I met is a vet.”

“That makes a difference,” Andrews admitted, and the girl, Lucy Reed, said:

“You haven't met any women, have you?”

Carrol began to apologize, but she took his hand, laughing at him, and then he sat there, uncertain and uneasy about the way she held his hand, uncomfortable too at the overtness of her approach. Yet he couldn't help but feel her assurance, and the almost aggressive approach at him held in it an assured warmth, as if she were an old friend and not someone he had only met this evening. But as they drove along he realized that he had seen her before, at least once, with Andrews, but not noticed her as he was noticing her tonight. He felt, tonight, that fine alertness and sensitivity to life that comes even to the happiest of human beings only once in a while, and then more than makes up for dull days, boredom and frustration. The reception, which would include all of the English faculty, their wives, their petty lusts, jealousies and discontents, he somehow looked forward to with excitement, as if the evening were bound to promise something.

He was not listening to Andrews denying the universality of Melville. “To me, he is a uniquely American product, and it is precisely on that point I'd take issue with you, Brighton.” The girl next to him and holding his hand, he discovered, was more than handsome and quite beautiful, pale, but with fine, clean-cut features and a long-limbed body. His own reserve, he finally decided, qualified everything; that was one of the reasons he remained unmarried at thirty-five; that was why, if the evening were not otherwise so pleasant, he would have resented fiercely Andrews, whom he hardly knew, a professor in Elizabethan Poetry, calling him by his first name and plunging on with an obviously ridiculous criticism. Andrews didn't know what he was talking about, but that he dismissed with an offhand remark and spoke to the girl, but only a few words. Then they were there, looking for a parking place outside of the department head's house.

“You will be lionized tonight,” the girl said.

Andrews told him, as they got out of the car, “We can get away at twelve, if you just want to sit down at my place and relax, my wife and perhaps one or two others.”

He answered noncommittally, more annoyed with Andrews because the girl had slipped away and gone into the house than because Andrews' invitation was not in the best of taste. However, he liked Andrews' wife, whom he remembered as a pleasant, healthy-looking woman who had sat through one of his seminars, and he substituted “I'll see” for a straight refusal.

Inside, everyone had liked his talk at the convocation and told him so, and he reflected again that this was a department in which he would work very comfortably and perhaps with a good deal of satisfaction. There was something large and straightforward about Carrol, and he had that easy youthfulness which is characteristic of many American men, and which, when combined with any degree of intelligence, can be immensely charming. Also, early in his stay at the University, he had endeared himself to the English faculty.

The head of the department had a pleading, Middle Western passion for Wordsworth, which he indulged to the extent of spending all of the department's museum money on first editions of the British bard. Aside from resentment on national grounds, there were other poets who ranked higher in the estimation of various membrs of the department, and their joy knew no bounds when Carrol said to the head, at lunch one day:

“I should think it would be Riley.”

“Who?”

“Instead of Wordsworth, I mean.”

“Did you say Riley?”

Innocently enough and without smiling, Carrol managed, “Yes, James Whitcomb Riley. I mean, he trod this very soil—”

The head of the department never quite made up his mind whether Carrol was a Philistine or a boor, but the story was told around, and everyone else loved him for it. Now, tonight, they were genuinely sorry that he was going away, and the group of animated men and women, drinking sherry and brandy, almost took on that warm and wise and balanced combination of wit and civilization that had become so foreign to America, but still lurked on a campus. Or it may have been that Carrol wanted to see it that way and did. In any case, he was at his best, and they talked of what he felt were better things than war and the threat of war, the ugly, crouching monster which implied that this was the end of all things for all time.

Lucy Reed sat near him, but not obtrusively. She would move away and then be back again, watching him. When he had a minute alone with Eve Andrews, he asked her, “How old is the Reed girl?”

“Why?”

“I thought I'd like to know something about her—what she does. Is she on the staff?”

“She's twenty-nine. She was after her doctorate, but gave it up.”

And he was moved to say lamely that he thought she looked younger. It was the way Mrs. Andrews regarded him that thrust him away, and he found himself listening to the conversation instead of being a part of it, and thereby it became commonplace, a good deal of it rather stupid. He listened to people saying things to him, and he answered them too, but an insatiable loneliness had suddenly taken hold of him; and he wondered whether in a foolish, adolescent way, he was forming a crush for Lucy Reed. It would be ironic, indeed, he told himself, if after waiting as long as he had—incapable for some reason that had never troubled him overmuch of forming a permanent alliance or relationship with any woman—he were to form what he liked to think of as a fixation on a girl in a provincial Middle Western college town.

But he forgot that when he found a few minutes alone with her and they were able to talk. She was quite tall, a strong, long-limbed girl, and in the way she stood, her actions, her speech—in everything about her, actually—was that quality he envied so much, a fierce devotion to life, a love of life, a consuming interest in the very essence of living. There was no cynicism in her, yet obtuseness was not there as a substitute. She seemed to be better read and better informed than most of the people he had met on the campus, and she looked at him with the kind of alert delight that he had not found in the eyes of any woman in a long, long time.