The Oasis (10 page)

There was little discussion, after this, between them: they sat leafing through magazines and tinkering with the portable victrola; Macdermott, Sidney reported, would vote with them, and Eleanor also, presumably. This, to his faction’s bewilderment, seemed to make Taub only more moody. He grunted, almost with displeasure, as Harold undertook to show him that his group was in the majority. “Never mind that. Who’s against us?” he demanded, with a slow resuscitation of interest, when the Norells, possibly Haines, and Desmond, the Catholic scholar, were ticked off, one by one, in Harold’s methodical style. “A-a-h, we’ll vote them down!” he spat out, suddenly brisk and businesslike, heaving himself forward in his chair and quailing his followers with a look. From the outset, there had been a clear understanding that the will of the majority was not to be used to coerce a minority, though no actual veto-power had been written into the bylaws, the colonists concluding, from the lesson of historical events, that the veto-power itself in the hands of a stubborn minority could be an instrument of force. Danny Furnas now raised his blond eyebrows into semi-circles of questioning and made a whistling
motion with his lips. Not being a sentimentalist, he saw no need for a display of theoretic virtue; his vote would speak for itself. Meanwhile, though mildly, he interposed a new demurrer. “They may resign, Will,” he pointed out, wondering whether he could frighten Taub by the prospect of a colony without workers. “Nah!” said Taub, definitively. “They won’t resign. Where would they go?”

Danny pushed forward a judicious lower lip and gently rocked his head back and forth, as if considering. “M-m-mm,” he finally conceded, and let his chin sink to rest in his palm, using an elbow for a prop, in the attitude of a philosophic student at a lecture that promises to be endless. This disengaged and contemplative position he retained throughout the meeting; his chin gradually sank deeper into his palm, till only the broad short nose and musing round eyes were visible. The most popular of the realist faction, he was the recipient of many bipartisan winks and nods, as the other council members came rapidly through the door, more prompt in attendance than in the city and peculiarly more self-conscious. Curt greetings were exchanged; Desmond cocked a jewel-like green eye at the coffee-table and registered the absence of the whisky bottle; he and Editor Haines passed a wordless message of comment; the secretary opened his notebook; Eleanor Macdermott cleared her throat.

“You have the floor,” she declared drily, convening the meeting and gesturing to Taub to begin. The group turned toward him expectantly, shifting their
camp chairs. A feeling that the present meeting would serve as a test of strength had suddenly become a certainty to nearly everyone in the room. How, nobody could imagine, so that a little stir of curiosity quickened, not altogether displeasurably, the insistent sense of foreboding that the inclusion of the realists in the experiment had attached to every action and gesture. Conscious of this suspense, and prolonging it for tactical reasons, Taub sent a shrewd, probing look around the room, appeared to estimate for a moment, nodded curtly to himself, took a draught of his cigarette, exhaled slowly and luxuriously, opened his mouth to speak, and suddenly found himself wordless. In all his arrangements and calculations, he had overlooked only one thing: what he wished, concretely, to propose. The expulsion of Joe Lockman had figured only hazily in his mind as the possible outcome of his intrigues, and he had imagined proceeding toward this blur by a series of easy stages. Certain harsh scenes from later in the evening, it is true, his own clenched fist and protruding thumb raised on high to demolish the unavailing argument of an opponent, Macdermott’s weak, angry stammer, Katy’s frightened eyes, had appeared to him with a vivid distinctness that enslaved his powers of attention and left him no freedom of thought. Awaking abruptly from their spell, seeing all these faces directed toward him clad in Sunday democratic expressions, he did not know how to begin: his habitual fear of showing his hand too early made him utterly incapable of an initiative. After a moment of
baffled reflection, in which his intelligence struggled to give quasi-judicial form to the mass of spiteful feelings, which had suddenly ceased to seethe in him, he contrived to find a way out. “I’ll pass it to Harold,” he announced, in a bland and matter-of-fact voice that took no notice of the general amazement or of Harold’s irrepressible start. He leaned abruptly back, audience-fashion in his chair, his arm flung loosely to one side, waiting, as it appeared, to hear Harold’s thoughts on this subject, quite as if they were not as familiar to him as his own. Sidney, rapidly running over the agenda as he understood it, found himself also at a loss. He did not know what Taub wanted him to say, and was obliged, finally, to lean over to consult him in a whisper. Taub frowned at his suggestion and emphatically shook his head. Harold shrugged and threw up his hands despairingly. Taub tapped him and whispered; Sidney concurred, doubtfully, and after a last-minute flurry of indecision, got up and began to speak.

“I assume,” he commenced jerkily, with an aborted ‘easiness’ of delivery, “that we’re all friends here. What I’m going to say reflects no criticism on anybody present. We all make mistakes …” A few perfunctory nods acknowledged this preamble; he went on in a more businesslike tone. “Suppose we start with last night …” And he began to rehearse, very much in the manner of an attorney representing a client in a damage suit, the story of Taub’s experience on the mountain-top; the effect on his nerves and sensibility; the traumatic shock he underwent when he imagined himself arrested by
a policeman (“Cossacks we used to call them—you can all remember that”); Taub’s radical background; his alienation as an intellectual from the mass-culture of the drugstore and the radio serial. He then went on to describe Joe—a well-intentioned Babbitt, a Boy Scout still living in the escapades of the First War, a useful citizen perhaps, but unfitted for an environment of neurosis. Finally, the broader impact of Joe on the community: the target-practice; broken sleep; the danger to the children; the stove (admittedly an accident); Katy’s hair; her quarrel (if he was not being too personal) with her husband. He looked to Taub for further directives and, receiving none, sat down.

“The question!” cried Katy. “The question!” She had come prepared for a battle, and could not refrain from pressing her advantage.

Sidney looked at Taub and both shrugged their shoulders. There was a short silence. Sidney coughed deferentially. “I think Mac has something to say.” “Well,” said Mac, rising to his feet, “I
did
have a few things on my mind, but you boys …” and suddenly he began waving his arms as if in an uncontrollable fit and laughing, a high, flute-like sound interspersed with patches of helpless choking. “Oh, my God!” he cried. “Will!” Danny Furnas looked up and began to snicker also. In a moment, the room was convulsed. Harold’s giggle soon could be heard, Haines’ deep, husky guffaw, and finally Will’s chuckle, beginning unwillingly and gradually mellowing, as a large foolish smile wreathed his irresolute features in a look of
the utmost contentment, in which vanity, chagrin, and relief were indeterminately distributed. His cumbrous thighs spread apart, tightening his ill-fitting duck trousers at the crotch, his bare arms hanging at his sides, his polo-shirt gaping at the neck, he presented a boyish picture of a proud and gratified culprit; the real ingenuousness of his nature sprang into sudden prominence. This man of transparent secrets, caught, as it were red-handed, yielded himself pleasurably to the boisterous humor of his companions, like a small-town kid dragged struggling from his place of concealment during a game of hide-and-go-seek. Only his wife, Cynthia, was immune to the general merriment; she looked coldly down her straight nose at her fellow-Utopians, until she was quite certain that this was all in fun. Her ideas were rather rigid, like those of a royal duchess. She had a firm sense of her husband’s position, and she wished to be assured that there was nothing seditious in this laughter before giving it countenances.

“And Harold!” Macdougal cried, when he was able to articulate. “That speech!” He laughed again until the tears ran, yet appreciatively, without pettiness, as though paying tribute to a genuine though unconscious work of art. “A great ambulance-chaser was lost in you,” he declared, almost seriously, shaking his red head, and taking Harold by the arm to indicate the kindliness of his feelings. This risibility of Macdermott’s was the crowning and unexpected grace of his character; it was an
élan vital
, seemingly springing
from nowhere, which buoyed him up and translated him into a realm of pure essences, beyond the pedantry of judgment. The targets of his satire could never truly dislike Macdermott, for they found themselves endowed by it with a larger and more fabulous life. Taub and Sidney, now, could not but feel that this laughter left them somehow in an improved position; it reconciled them, to their surprise, with themselves and with others, and permitted them to live down a humiliation whose causes they were reluctant to search for in the duller chambers of blame and excuse.

Sensible of the change in the atmosphere, Taub retired to the kitchen and came out with whisky and glasses. Someone went to the main house for ice and soda water; Preston Norell fetched wine, and the treasurer took the opportunity to draw Taub aside and ask him for a contribution, a thing he might well have done earlier, had not something ungenerous and straitlaced in his goodness (he was a member of the purist faction) been unwilling to help Taub to extricate himself from a false position. “You should have asked me before, Henry,” Taub remonstrated softly, as he got out his checkbook and in his large, unformed handwriting, scrawled out a medium-sized check. Henry, a tall, thin young man with an ovoid head who resembled a nail-file, felt an immediate rising of irritation; his pride as a functionary was nettled at having negligence ascribed to him when he had merely not exceeded his duty; at the same time, his conscience admitted that the reproof was, in a finer sense, justified. But that he should
be made to seem guilty, twice over, once wrongly, once rightly, while Taub remained blandly innocent, infuriated this radical young printer, who was not accustomed to dealing with persons of a certain eminence. He took the wet check, blew on it, and withdrew to a corner of the room, rebuffing a whisky and soda. “Thanks, my wife and I don’t drink,” he declared.

That evening, nevertheless, marked the beginning of the lyrical phase of the community. The issue of Joe Lockman was allowed to drop, once Editor Haines had contributed “a very sensible suggestion”: that Joe should be requested to hold off the shooting till after breakfast-time. “Do you want that in the form of a motion?” Eleanor Macdermott asked. “No,” everyone cried. “Just let someone speak to him,” and the secretary closed his book without having taken a note, since no official business had been transacted. Later, sitting on the floor, a little apart from the others, Macdermott and John Desmond tried to analyze what had happened to the realist case. “It’s a fundamental weakness of their position,” Macdermott was explaining in a low voice, as if he were passing on a war-secret. “They don’t know what they want. Give them the floor and they’ll hang themselves; I’ve seen it every time.” Desmond, who was very handsome, nodded with a somber face. “Revolutionary nihilism,” he muttered; he was sufficiently new to his recaptured religion to refer every phenomenon to a pronouncement of the Church. “Those boys aren’t revolutionists,” Macdermott whispered scoffingly. “They’re conservatives. They’re so
conservative they’re afraid of their own thoughts.” Desmond listened doubtfully, with an evasive hitch of his fine, square shoulders. “The terms need defining,” he declared at last, very softly and thoughtfully. Macdermott coughed. In general, he enjoyed speaking with people who disagreed with him or people less intelligent than himself, but now, still full of his subject, he was in want of a congenial listener. He got up, excusing himself, and went over to Taub, who was standing smoking alone by the fireplace. “Why not Taub?” he said to himself simply. “Say, Will,” he announced, raising a half-playful finger, “I’ve got an idea for you …” And he began to explain to Taub, quite without malice and indeed with the desire to be helpful, just how he and his faction always defeated themselves. Taub listened with interest, nodding slowly as he took in the argument, and moving his lips slightly, repeating Macdermott’s words under his breath, as if storing them for the winter. “You’re all wrong, Mac,” he placidly declared, when he saw that Macdermott had finished. “What?” demanded Macdermott, unable to believe his ears, and beginning to gasp and stutter. “Is that all you have to say?” He felt utterly nonplussed and bewildered, like a suitor rejected without an explanation. Taub gave a confirming nod, and then, with great exactness, crossed two large fingers, held them aloft for attention, and then, having secured Mac’s eye, repeated, with the measured delivery of one who is speaking for history, “You’re all
wrong
.”

This was the last open combat to take place between the two leaders. Both emerged from it with a sense of victory, and a sense, also, of wasted time. From then on, discussions between them dealt only with practical matters or with neutral subjects from which no positional inferences need be drawn. Hopeless each of persuading the other or of dealing a blow which, from the point of view of the receiver, could be recognized as incapacitating, they resigned themselves to their differences and commenced, for want of anything better, to see each other’s good points. A burst of friendship followed this easing of relations, as often happens in love-affairs when two people decide that they do not “mean much” to each other. The practical gain in sociability, in evening-calls, work-sharing, advice offered and taken, was immense. Yet there was no doubt, as the more alert purists began to notice, that the
idea
of the colony had somehow received a setback. The hope of establishing a Universal to which all men would pay homage was being tacitly set aside in favor of a policy of live-and-let-live. The discovery that one cannot convince an opponent and that it is hopeless to go on trying involves a confession of subjectivity that deprives the world of meaning: the colony, it seemed to the Norells and Leo Raphael, a poet, was losing its
raison d’être
, if it was no longer a question of converting Taub and his faction to a manifest Truth but simply of getting along with them on a day-to-day basis. Was it really worth while, they asked themselves, to have come all this distance, and
invested so much ardor and energy, only to produce what was, in effect, another summer-vacation colony, cooperatively financed? For the regeneration of a soul, a nation, a party, according to the feelings of this group, admission of past error was requisite. The Nuremberg trials and the de-nazification proceedings had demonstrated, a few years before, that it was impossible to
impose
an awareness of guilt on a man who declines to feel guilty, yet now they could not help but feel a baffled thirst for justice as they watched Taub and his cohorts complacently settle down in Utopia, as though it were their natural preserve.