Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (279 page)

That her complaisance was not the result of passion was soon obvious; there was not so much a failure on my part to arouse her as a refusal on hers to be aroused beyond an inescapable degree. Even as she permitted our intimacy she remained as virginal, aloof, and critical as before.

“It seems hardly worth the trouble. Imagine people talking and writing and thinking about nothing else.”

“Tirzah dear—”

“And the liberties that seem to go with it. I don’t think of you as any more dear than I did an hour ago. If people must indulge in this sort of thing, and I suppose they must since it’s been going on for a long time, I think it could be conducted with more dignity.”

As my infatuation increased her coolness did not lessen; curiosity alone seemed to move her. She was amused at my pathetic search for knowledge. “What good is your learning ever going to do you? It’ll never get you a penny.”

I smoothed the long, pale hair and kissed her ear. “Suppose it doesn’t?” I argued lazily. “There are other things besides money.”

She drew away. “That’s what those who can’t get it always say.”

“And what do people who can get it say?”

“That it’s the most important thing of all,” she answered earnestly. “That it will buy all the other things.”

“It will buy you free of your indenture,” I admitted, “but you have to get it first.”

“Get it first? I never let it go. I still have the contract payment.”

“Then what was the point of indenting at all?”

She looked at me wonderingly. “Haven’t you ever thought about serious things? Only books and politics and all that? How could I get opportunities without indenting? I doubt if the Vames are much of a cut above the Backmakers; well, you’re a general drudge and I’m a governess and tutor and even in a way a sort of distant friend to Mrs. Smythe.”

“That sounds suspiciously like snobbery to me.”

“Does it? Well, I’m a snob; I’ve never denied it. I want to live like a lady, to have a good house with servants and carriages and minibiles, to travel to civilized countries, with a place in Paris or Rome or Vienna. You can love the poor and cheer for the Populists; I love the rich and the Whigs.”

“That’s all very well,” I objected, “but even though you have your indenting money and can buy back your freedom any moment you want it, how does this help you get rich?”

“Do you think I keep my money in my pocket? It’s invested, every cent. People who come to this house give me tips; not just money, though there’s enough of that to add a bit to my original capital, but tips on what to buy and sell. By the time I’m thirty I should be well off. Of course, I may marry a rich man sooner.”

“That’s an awfully cold-blooded way of looking at marriage,” I remonstrated.

“Is it?” she asked indifferently. “Well, you’ve been telling me I’m cold-blooded anyway. I may as well be cold-blooded profitably.”

“If that’s the way you feel I don’t understand what we’re doing here at this moment. I’d have thought you’d have picked a more profitable lover.”

She was unruffled. “You didn’t think about it at all. If you had, you would have seen I could hardly encourage any of the men from the class into which I intend to marry. Great ladies can laugh at gossip, but the faintest whisper about someone like me would be damaging. Scandal would be unavoidable if I appeared to be anything in this house but a chilly prude.”

An appearance not too deceitful, I considered, sickly jealous at the thought of men who might have been in my place if they had been as anonymous, as inconsequential as I. But this writhing jealousy was little more painful than my frustration at having been made a convenience, a trial experiment. Almost anyone of equal unimportance, anyone who was not a fellow servant or a familiar in the house would have done as well as I, anyone unlikely ever to come face-to-face with Mrs. Smythe, much less talk to her.

Looking back, trying to recapture for a moment that vanished past, I have a sad, quizzical welling of pity for the girl Tirzah and the boy Hodge. How gravely we took our moral and political differences; how lightly the flying moments of union. We said and did all the wrong things, all the things which fostered the antagonism between us and none of the things which might have softened our youthful self-assurance. We wrangled and argued: Dewey and Lewis, Whig versus Populist, materialist against idealist, reality opposing principle. It all seems so futile now; it all appeared so vital then.

Added to the almost unanimous distrust and hatred of all foreigners in the United States, we regarded the Confederates in particular as the cause of all our misfortunes. We not only blamed and feared them, but looked upon them as sinister, so Populist orators had a ready-made response every time they referred to the Whigs as Southron tools.

Contrary to the accepted view in the United States, I was sure the victors in the War of Southron Independence had been men of the highest probity, and the noblest among them was their second president. Yet I also knew that immediately after the Peace of Richmond less dedicated individuals became increasingly powerful in the new nation. As Sir John Dahlberg remarked, “Power tends to corrupt.”

From his first election in 1865 until his death ten years later, President Lee had been the prisoner of an increasingly strong and imperialistic Congress. He had opposed the invasion and conquest of Mexico by the Confederacy, undertaken on the pretext of restoring order during the conflict between the republicans and the emperor. However, he had too profound a respect for the constitutional processes to continue this opposition in the face of joint resolutions by the Confederate House and Senate.

Lee remained a symbol, but as the generation which had fought for independence died, the ideals he symbolized faded. Negro emancipation, enacted largely because of pressure from men like Lee, soon revealed itself as a device for obtaining the benefits of slavery without its obligations. The freedmen on both sides of the new border were without franchise, and for all practical purposes without civil rights. Yet while the old Union first restricted and then abolished immigration, the Confederacy encouraged it, making the newcomers subjects like the Latin Americans who made up so much of the Southron population after the Confederacy expanded southward, limiting full citizenship to posterity of enfranchised residents in the Confederate States on July Fourth 1864.

The Populists claimed the Whigs were Confederate agents; the Whigs retorted that the Populists were visionaries and demagogues who tolerated if they did not actually encourage the activities of the Grand Army. The Populists replied by pointing to their platform which denounced illegal organizations and lawless methods. I was not too impressed by this, knowing how busy Tyss, Pondible, and their associates had been ever since the campaign started.

On election night Tyss closed the store, and we walked the few blocks to Wanamaker & Stewarts drygoods store where a big screen showed the returns between tinugraphs puffing the firm’s merchandise. From the first it was apparent the unpredictable electorate preferred Dewey to Lewis. State after state, hitherto staunchly Populist, turned to the Whigs for the first time since William Hale Thompson defeated President Thomas R. Marshall back in 1920 and again Alfred E. Smith in 1924, before Smith gained the great popularity which gave him the presidency four years later. Only Massachusetts, Connecticut, Dakotah, and Oregon went for Lewis; his own Minnesota along with twenty-one other states plumped for Dewey.

Disappointed as I was, I could not but note Tyss’s cheerful air. When I asked him what satisfaction he could find in so overwhelming a defeat he smiled and said, “What defeat, Hodgins? Did you think we wanted the Populists to win? To elect Jennings Lewis with his program of world peace conferences? Really Hodgins, I’m afraid you learn nothing day by day.”

“You mean the Grand Army wanted Dewey all along?”

“Dewey or another; we prefer a Whig administration which presents a fixed target to a Populist one wavering all over the place.”

Of course, it should have occurred to me that Tyss and Tirzah would wind up on the same side. It was a measure of my innocence that it never had.

VI.

ENFANDIN

Tirzah’s question, “What good is your learning ever going to do you?” bothered me from time to time. Not that I was burdened by any vast amount of knowledge, but presumably I would get more—and then what? It was true I expected no rewards from reading except the pleasure it gave me, but the future, to use a top-heavy word, could not be entirely disregarded. I could not see myself spending a lifetime in the bookstore. I was grateful to Tyss, despite his disdain of this emotion, for the opportunities he had given me, but not grateful enough to reconcile myself to becoming another Tyss, especially one without his vitalizing involvement with the Grand Army.

Other courses were neither numerous nor inviting. To follow Tirzah’s own example might have seemed feasible if one ignored the vast differences of situation and character, to say nothing of those between a hulking youth and a pretty girl. I could hardly hope to find a wealthy family who would buy my services, put me to congenial tasks, and look with tolerance on my efforts to advance myself right out of their employment. Even if such a chance existed I could not have utilized it as she did; I should undoubtedly confuse one stock with another or neglect to buy what I was told until too late, winding up with lottery tickets and losing the stubs.

My helpless uncertainty only added to my disadvantage with her. I had no hope her coolness would change to either ardor or affection. At any moment she might decide her curiosity was satisfied and find the awkwardness, inconveniences, and what must have been to her the sordidness of the affair too great.

We were a strange pair of young lovers. When we talked we argued opposing views or spoke sedately of things not near our hearts. When we walked together in the streets or fled the gaslit pavements for the moon over Reservoir Square we neither held hands nor kissed impulsively. Because prudence forbade the slightest physical contact save in utmost privacy there were no innocent touchings or accidental brushing of hands against hips or arms against arms, and our secret embraces were guilty simply because they were secret.

Often I dreamed of a miraculous change, either in circumstances or in her attitude, to dissolve the walls between us; beneath the hope was only expectation of an abrupt and final break. Yet when it came at last, after more than a year, it was not the result, as I had agonizedly anticipated, of some successful speculation or an offer of marriage, but of natural and normal actions of my own.

Among the customers to whom I frequently delivered parcels of books was a Monsieur Rene Enfandin who lived on Eighth Street, not far from Fifth Avenue. M. Enfandin was consul for the Republic of Haiti; the house he occupied was distinguished from otherwise equally drab neighbors by a large red and blue escutcheon over the doorway. He did not use the entire dwelling himself, reserving only the parlor floor for the office of the consulate and living quarters; the rest was let to other tenants.

Tyss’s anti-foreign bias caused him to jeer at Enfandin behind his back and embark on discourses which proved by anthropometry and frequent references to Lombroso and Chief Jung that Negroes were incapable of self-government. I noticed, however, that he treated the consul no differently, either in politeness or honesty, from his other patrons, and by this time I knew Tyss well enough to attribute this courtesy not to the self-interest of a tradesman but to that compassion which he suppressed so sternly under the contradictions of his nature.

For a long time I paid little attention to Enfandin, beyond noting the wide range of interests revealed by the books he bought. I sensed that, like myself, he was inclined to shyness. He had an arrangement whereby he turned back most of his purchases for credit on others. I saw that if he hadn’t, his library would have soon dispossessed him; as it was, books covered all the space not taken by the paraphernalia of his office and bedroom with the exception of a bit of bare wall on which hung a large crucifix. He seemed always to have a volume in his large, dark brown hand, politely closed over his thumb or open for eager sampling.

Enfandin was tall and strong-featured, notable in any company. In the United States where a black man was, more than anything else, a reminder of the disastrous war and Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation, he was the permanent target of rowdy boys and adult hoodlums. Even the diplomatic immunity of his post was poor protection, for it was believed, not without justification, that Haiti, the only American republic south of the Mason-Dixon line to preserve its independence, was disrupting the official if sporadically executed policy of deporting Negroes to Africa by encouraging their emigration to its own shores or, what was even more annoying, assisting them to flee to the unconquered Indians of Idaho or Montana.

Beyond a “Good morning” or “Thank you” I doubt if we exchanged a hundred words until the time I saw a copy of Randolph Bourne’s
Fragment
among his selections. “That’s not what you think it is,” I exclaimed brashly; “it’s a novel.”

He looked at me gravely. “You also admire Bourne?”

“Oh yes.” I felt a trifle foolish, not only for having thrust my advice upon him, but for the inadequacy of my comment on a writer who had so many pertinent things to say and had been persecuted for saying them. I was conscious, too, of Tyss’s opinion: How could a cripple like Bourne speak to whole and healthy men?

“But you do not approve of fiction, is that so?” Enfandin had no discernible accent, but often his English was uncolloquial and sometimes it was overly careful and stiff.

I thought of the adventure tales I had once swallowed so breathlessly. “Well…it does seem to be a sort of a waste of time.”

He nodded. “Time, yes…We waste it or save it or use it—one would almost think we mastered it instead of the other way around. Yet are all novels really a waste of the precious dimension? Perhaps you underestimate the value of invention.”