The Oasis (6 page)
This Te Deum swelling in Taub’s heart reverberated throughout the colony. The membership was tranquilly a-hum in the abandoned summer resort, a three-story hotel with cottages done in the Swiss chalet style which had failed many years before, during the First World War, been half renovated in the late thirties and left to stand as it was, when gas-rationing and the shortage of food condemned it for summer-vacationing and the seashore replaced the mountains as the American playground. Beds, chairs, lamps, washstands, screens, of the era of the resort’s short popularity, remained in their places; flour and meal and sugarbins, iron and granite-ware pots, flame-toasters and waffle-irons stood ready to hand in the big kitchen; rusted irons in the laundry challenged the more adventurous women to clean them and heat them on the stove. It was as if the hotel and its furnishings had been arrested at the magical moment of the average birth-date of the colonists nearly forty years before, and arrested also, conveniently, at the stage of mechanization to which
the colonists wished to return. A whole system of life stood waiting to be resumed, a point which had persuaded the realists to submit to the purists’ ideology, particularly since the drafting of labor and the scarcity of materials, owing to the oncoming war, put large-scale modernization in any case out of the question. And the realists too, of both tendencies, were not insensitive to the charm of the fresh start, so aptly symbolized in the old hotel and its appliances, which took them back to the age of their innocence, to the dawn of memory, and the archaic figures of Father and Mother. Here, for the moment, it seemed to all of them that it was possible to begin over again from the beginning and correct the small error that was responsible for the vast confusion, like the single mistake made at any early stage in a mathematical calculation which accounts for a difference of billions in the final answer.
It was not, as their enemies alleged, that the colonists desired to turn the clock back once and for all; it pleased them, rather, to set it at the moment of their entrance onto the human scene, clean it, and start it going again. They might have set it earlier or later—the Catholic scholar, for example, would have preferred, at least in theory, to go back before Copernicus, and the long-legged girl student imagined that the first Roosevelt Administration had been the high point of human achievement. To some, the errors to be rectified were largely of a personal nature: Ed Jackson, drinking from the spring, stepping deep into wild forget-me-nots, recovered a lost sensation,
the pure, keen thirst of his boyhood, and knew that reform was still possible if water could give him such a kick. To others, it was not so much their own sins, but the burden of social error that seemed to drop from their shoulders—Versailles, Spain, Munich, Yalta, the failure of the socialist movement, all these massive objective factors with which they had had to contend in a struggle increasingly hopeless, the dead weight of decisions taken in the world capitals which had the power of changing their lives without being changed by them, decisions which rested not on the popular will but on the resignation of a public which, despite the ballot-box, looked upon wars and social catastrophes as the medieval peasant looked upon cholera and earthquake, as manifestations of fatality, afflictions from the Beyond. Here, at any rate, the premises of action were the colonists’ own; here the mistakes of Kautsky, Lenin, Wilson, Chamberlain, Roosevelt, Attlee, Truman, Dewey, not to mention the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Mussolini, were not, so to speak, dealt out to them as the cards they were forced to play with, or else get out of the game. They shuffled their own deck, and even the realists, who saw the doom of the venture in some practical joker they called “human nature,” expected this joker to assert itself in the behavior of the colonists themselves and not somewhere outside them, in the inscrutable order of things.
The recovery, if only in token, of a world small and self-contained, had, that first night, an exhilarating effect, and the presence of very obvious difficulties of a
practical sort only enlivened the membership to meet and answer the challenge. The committee in charge of housing had been prepared for a great many complaints; it received nothing but praise. To many of the members, the discovery that they could do without their comforts came as a delightful surprise, as though the material objects which had been subtracted from their bodies were added, by way of compensation, to their moral girth. For a majority, material life in the real world had been easy, relatively speaking, and mental life hard; the reversal of this relation gave birth to a sense of resourcefulness long missing from their spirits. The limits of their mental capacities they knew all too well. They had yet to find the limits of their physical powers, but the disclosure that he could trim a wick, say, was an almost overwhelming experience for a man who had felt sick with fear whenever the electric company wrote him that the power would be turned off if the bill were not paid by the fifteenth.
Independent action
became, for the first time that night, something more than a phrase; the most impetuous spirits went racing ahead in their talk to a moment when the colony would produce not only its own eggs, milk, butter, cheese, hams, vegetables, and bacon, but furniture, shoes, and clothing. The idea that for certain things—oil, paper, medicines—they would always be beholden to society nearly brought tears to their eyes, as it collided sharply with their fancy, though they had faced it calmly enough back there in the city, where any improvement in their condition seemed almost
too much to ask for. A
complete break
with the present was already being envisioned in some quarters before the first egg had been laid, and one purist, going for milk, was arguing with another the propriety of their action, since according to the by-laws a herd should have been delivered on the day of their arrival—a firm line must be taken or they would soon be buying store-bread at the filling-station down below.
Joe Lockman was the only one in the group to be genuinely disturbed by the regression, as he thought of it, to an age of inconvenience. He was an old hand at roughing it—which was not the trouble. Just to show the stuff he was made of, he had spent the whole afternoon with his scythe, subduing the Utopian hillside, working at top speed and with no variation of pace, leaving havoc behind him and alarm in the minds of his colleagues, who did not understand the motive for such a wholesale act of destruction. The signs of industry in his fellows—a man mowing the lawn and another putting up a hammock; a husband driving in clothes-poles and a wife hanging curtains in her window—he had watched with favor, interrupting his work to come down and give a word of advice (“Just let me have that lawn-mower a minute, young man, and I’ll show you how to do it”). Something, nevertheless, in the prevailing attitude did not smell right to him. It struck him that the colonists were virtually playing house. It made him quite uneasy to see those old lyre-backed wicker chairs dragged out so joyfully onto the lawn; he remembered them perfectly from
his youth and regretted not having brought his foam-rubber glider from Belmont, brand-new last autumn and a thousand times more comfortable. All those oohs and aahs over the woodstoves and the waffle-irons sounded forced in his ears—could anyone honestly mean them? His wife hated cooking and would never adjust herself to using those clumsy old devices. Ever since the Second War, they had been doing without a regular maid; she seemed to prefer it that way, now that the children’s rooms were empty, just the two of them alone in the house. She liked bakery cakes, ready mixes, redispreads, rolls from the delicatessen; she often had him stop at the S. S. Pierce cold meat counter or the Home Foods department at Schrafft’s on Tremont Street to bring in something for supper. A nice little steak or some chops she did not mind doing, and Sundays, if she had to, if the parents were coming to dinner, she would put her roast in a self-basting pan, set the thermometer on the oven, and go upstairs to lie down. He knew Eva’s habits very well, and he could see that she was not going to get along at all with these younger women ecstasizing over bread tins and butter churns.
Eva’s objections, however, were not the paramount question. Guessing how things would be, he had left an order with S. S. Pierce to send them a weekly food package—canned fruit, hams, hard salamis, smoked salmon, sandwich mixes, and a bottle or two of sparkling burgundy to be slipped in by a friendly clerk. His wife’s niceties and nerves, her hostilities and
resistance to change he had jollied along for years; he almost loved them in her, identifying them with the womanly; he thought her more fastidious than himself and her aversion to the outdoors, he took for a mark of superiority, like her linen pumps and her nylons and her bad times of the month. That Eva would be out of her element here, he had accepted from the start; only the imminent war had made her consent to accompany him; and he was grateful enough for her presence to resign himself to her disapproval, though even now, despite thirty years of experience, he would not quite part with the hope (which he chided in himself as treasonable) that the caustic little queen of his household could become the comrade of his pleasures. But an allegiance even more profound than what he owed his wife’s happiness was being shaken by the behavior of the Utopians. His loyalty to the modern was challenged.
The modern, with Joe, was a true passion and a cause, something more than a painter’s convention or a designer’s style. A great personal sincerity invested his feelings on this subject, for he was already a modern painter before he discovered the modern movement; the few lessons he had had in a business man’s art club in Boston had taught him only what he now called “a sterile academicism”—he had had to work out his idiom alone in his own backyard. The coincidence between his own efforts and the paintings of the School of Paris, pointed out to him finally by his amazed children, convinced him of the authenticity
of the revelation he had had. Under the influence of a teacher who gave lessons in art by correspondence, he came quickly to believe that the modern was some sort of duty laid on every man who had heard its call, a system of knowledge and perception equivalent to revealed religion—and for all those born too early to receive its message, for Raphael and Shakespeare, he felt a kind of pity like that of the pious Christian for the deprived souls of the ancients, who died too soon to get the benefit of the Redemption. The routines of factory and family life, much as he respected them, had long impeded his progress in spontaneous self-expression, so that the summons to Utopia, when it came, had reached him like an awaited signal. When his son felt it necessary to warn him that the colonists held advanced opinions, Joe at once prepared himself for a rigorous testing of his convictions in the crucible of practice. He had flexed his will for cabins built like iceboxes, steel chairs or none, a long communal table in the shape of a streak of lightning, people reciting poems and wearing eccentric costumes, free love even, and the children running about naked.
Nothing could have been better calculated to disturb his preconceptions than the 1910 summer hotel into which he found himself moving his drawing board. Of all periods in American history, the age of Taft made the least appeal to his imagination; he remembered it too well for it to hold for him any charm or mystery. Progress, in fact, to his mind, was measured against that era. Electric light, radio, television,
labor-saving devices for the housewife, the abolition of piece-work, the tractor, all the benefits to mankind that had been developed within his memory, seemed to him to have ameliorated beyond estimate the life of the average person; and though he believed that there had been some tendency to substitute mechanical pleasure for
living
(a favorite doctrine with him), to depend too uncreatively on the juke-box, the movies, and the automobile, he considered this merely a misapplication of inventions basically good. He knew that he himself could set off tomorrow with a bowie-knife and a compass and forge out a life for himself, should atomic raids oblige it, but he was too chivalrous to dream of this as a solution for the problems of mankind in general (what would become of poor Eva?), and the idea that the splitting of the atom was in any way evil in itself had never entered his mind. The derogation of technology that was going on all around him was something strange to his ears; it struck him as slightly blasphemous, and he hoped that his wife would not hear it. The notion, moreover, that the past thirty-five years, the whole of his adult life, had been misspent by society, a notion that seemed to be current on the lawn, in the kitchen, in the lounge, filled him with consternation. He felt disillusioned with the colonists and did not know what to think.
On the porch, waiting for Eva to call him to supper (irregular meals were bad for a diabetic condition), he experienced a sudden antagonism to Macdougal Macdermott, who sat laughing over a yellowed newspaper
with a picture of a doughboy on the front page. Joe himself had fought in that war; indeed, his manhood had been seasoned in it—today, in his son’s old fatigue uniform, rolled up in the legs, with his slightly belligerent stance, he looked the veteran still, though grey and almost visibly aging, as though time were galloping through him like a horse racing to the finish.
Amour propre
urged him to insist that the first war had been necessary (he was not so sure about the second, in which his son had been wounded—Hitler, he thought now, should have been stopped in the Rhineland), but his positiveness was shaken by a sense that the bearded man’s self-assured laughter proceeded from obvious certainties to which only he was a stranger. He felt hurt, in his memories, the most defenseless part, and, unable to digest an emotion except through the catharsis of action, cast about for a way of making this clear to the others. A brace of partridge rising from the hill suggested the material for an object-lesson, a form of admonition, which had never failed him with his children or his salesmen. “Get them laughing, get them thinking,” he quoted, and went up to his room for his gun. In a few moments the party on the verandah saw him emerge onto the lawn, shoulder arms comically, and march off in drill-step singing “Over There.” “What’s up?” ejaculated Macdermott, interrupting himself briefly to cast a baffled glance at the manufacturer. A fellow intellectual shrugged. “Good hunting, Mr. Lockman!” trilled an oblivious voice from an upstairs window, serene in its
malentendu.
The rebuke had missed fire; no one had caught his meaning; and, half-puzzled, half-dismayed, Joe, still in march-time, his thin-skinned face knotted in conflict, vanished into the trees.
