The Oasis (7 page)

Up above, in the meadow, flushing the long grasses for game, he came upon Will Taub, still standing on the peak. Joe had no way of knowing that the soul of the realist chieftain was in a delicate condition,
enceinte
with a new man. He had observed him down on the lawn and marked him with a foreman’s eye, being as yet too much of a novice in intellectual circles to distinguish conversation as an authorized branch of labor. Idleness actually frightened him; he could not behave normally in its presence. He was tired himself now, though he did not admit it, and the sight of the able-bodied man young enough to be his son (here Joe was mistaken; there was only ten years difference in their ages) taking it easy on the summit brought on in him one of those fits of nervousness that another’s inactivity always produced in him. He felt an impulse, not so much to chide Taub, as to do something to get him moving. He knew very well that he ought not to interfere; the man was a stranger to him—“Remember, you are not at home,” Eva had warned him already; “don’t be too familiar; these people don’t know you, Joe.” But the same fatality that made him drop a pot-lid in the kitchen at seven o’clock in the morning when he had promised to be quiet and was moving about on tip-toe overrode him now. “Just a word to the wise,” he said to himself in extenuation. “Come on, Joe, let’s
get the lead out of his pants.” “State Police reporting,” he announced in a loud voice, coming up from behind Taub and shouldering his shotgun playfully. “Work or the guardhouse!”

Taub swung around with a start; his trembling hands jerked up hastily above his shoulders, as if by their own volition, in a gesture out of Keystone comedy which appeared both ludicrous and utterly natural, as though his whole life had been an apprehensive preparation for this summons. He stared woodenly at Joe, his mouth opening and closing. Joe broke into a laugh. “Gotcha,” he shouted, “brother. Say, boy, what’s wrong with your nerves?” But as Taub’s face began to relax, Joe saw from it what he had done. The sympathy he had ready for all sick and wounded creatures commenced at once to flow. “Oh,” he said impetuously, “I’m sorry.” He put out a hand to touch Taub’s shoulder. But he could not modulate to solicitude without a glissade of buffoonery. “Aw,” he exclaimed, mock-wheedling, kicking a foot in the dirt in imitation of an urchin, “I didn’t really scare ya, did I?” Getting no reply, he grew still more contrite and serious and spoke finally in a natural voice. “Forgive me,” he declared with a sigh. All this time, he was studying Taub’s face eagerly, hunching his neck and pressing his own unshaven face with the rimless glasses forward, like a woman pleading her cause and searching the features of her lover for some token or clue. The reality of this terror was patent enough, but he was concerned to find the reason behind it. Having injured Taub, he had no
wish to think ill of him (contrary to general practice), and the idea that Will was naturally fearful could not therefore enter his mind. A thought finally dawned on him. “Shucks,” he exclaimed. “I ought to have known. You’re a radical.” Taub nodded dumbly, accepting this, almost with gratitude, as the most favorable explanation of his conduct. But as soon as it occurred to him that he
was
after all a radical (the premise of his career recalling itself like the features of a forgotten friend), a righteous anger took possession of him. The trampling hooves of the police horses, the night-sticks flailing about, tear gas, arrest without warrant, torture, tar-and-feathers, all the indignities he
might
have suffered for his beliefs came vividly before his eyes: for all Joe knew, he had undergone them in person, and Joe’s ignorance now of the real facts of his history allowed him to think quite sincerely that this hypothetical case was his own.

“Ignorance is no excuse!” he yelled suddenly, turning on Joe and advancing a threatening step in his large white shoe. “What are you doing here?” He knew very well that this must be one of the colonists but chose to act as if no common tie could connect them—in this way he imagined that he was freed from the usual sanctions of behavior. Heedless of Joe’s expostulations, he brandished a fist in the air and bellowed, “Get out,” sternly. “No trespassing,” he added, carried away with his thoughts and pointing to an imaginary sign. “This is private property.”

Joe’s face looked pained. “I guess introductions are
in order,” he suggested with mild reproof. He was perfectly certain that Taub knew him for a Utopian; Taub’s eyes, seeking to avoid an act of recognition, kept sliding insecurely away from a meeting with Joe’s face, so that his very violence had an element of constraint and even dissimulation which Joe did not find sympathetic. Nevertheless, to save Taub embarrassment, he presented himself formally. Taub stared at him a moment, and then broke away without answering. He had placed Joe suddenly in his mind and remembered that it was Macdermott who had imposed him on the Utopian council. “
Fools!
” he muttered to himself as he strode off to his cottage. “Why did they bring him here? They must have been
mad
to think of it.” All his benignity had vanished; it seemed to him that the apparition of this clown was a part of a plot to deride and humiliate him in some fashion that was still obscure. His whole being felt outraged by what he had just gone through: practical jokes were anathema to him; they belonged to an order of things which defied his powers of anticipation, like children, birds, cows, water, snakes, lightning, Gentiles, and automobiles. The thought of associating with Joe over a period of months struck him as truly preposterous; he felt deeply offended with Macdermott for having taken it for granted that he could.

His mood was somewhat bettered by an encounter with two of the purist children, who, having witnessed the scene on the peak, leapt out at him from behind some bushes, pointing make-believe guns at him and
shouting, “State Police.” This time, at least he was not taken off his guard. Recognizing a young Macdermott, he tried a genial tone. “Well, little man,” he said, appropriating from some long-dead uncle this form of address, “what does your father think of your pointing guns at people?” “My father is a dope,” young Macdermott answered promptly, and Taub laughed aloud with pleasure at this echo of his own thoughts. “Ha, ha,” he said, “that’s good,” and he went off toward his cottage rehearsing the child’s phrase softly, well pleased with himself and the world. His own question and the boy’s answer seemed to him extremely witty: Susan disappointed him, when he stopped to tell her the story, by taking it too matter-of-factly (she had many nieces and nephews). “Poor Macdougal,” he elucidated, with a groan of half-genuine sympathy as he set himself in the ideologue’s shoes. “What a comedown for a pacifist! His own children call him a dope.”

Yet this deathblow, as he felt it, to the pretensions of the Macdermott faction did not quite dispose of the anger evoked by the collision with Joe. He went to bed in a bad humor, having quarreled with his wife about the stove, and was awakened very early by the sound of shots outside. To get back to sleep was impossible. In the city, he would have dressed, gone out tieless onto the street, bought coffee and a paper and felt himself king of the morning, the news, and the sleeping Village. But here he could only toss and wait for the communal breakfast, which was to be served in the central building, at an hour he was powerless
to advance. When he came out at last onto the lawn, wearing new work clothes that scratched him and cumbered the freedom of his gait, he found a small commotion. Off to one side in the clearing, Joe was doing target practice at an improvised rifle-range he had created by fixing some tin cans to locust-trees. The young veteran and the news editors had sauntered off to join him; others remained to watch, for the news had already got around that the oil stove was flooded and breakfast would be delayed. A good thirty, however, were gathered in the kitchen, where the cook of the day was sobbing, having burned off her bangs and eyebrows when she put a torch to the stove. She was laughing and crying at the same time, for while she prized her appearance (it was she who had brought the elaborate wardrobe), she had, so it happened, been Joe’s sponsor, together with her husband, and, recognizing her protégé’s hand in what had just befallen her, she was trying to treat the matter as lightly as possible.

“What happened, Katy?” Taub inquired with real solicitude; an accident to another moved him to identification. “Him?” he conjectured softly, darting a serpentine glance in the direction of the clearing, and nodding his head profoundly as he felt his suspicion confirmed. “Joe?” she answered vaguely. “I suppose. He was trying to get his breakfast without asking anybody anything. I ought to have warned him not to touch the stove.” Katy Norell was aware that this forgivingness sat well on her, in lieu at least of eyebrows
and hair, and she continued to repeat the explanation of just how it had happened to everyone who entered the room, until what had begun as sincere extenuation became, by asseveration, a kind of unpleasant accusal, since the latecomers would never have connected Joe with the accident if Katy had not told them exactly how he came to do it. Joe’s wife, Eva, in fact, tapping forward from the doorway on her small high heels, flung her a bitter look and absorbed herself very pointedly in a study of the stove’s mechanism, as if to suggest that the conviction rested on dubious testimony, and that this silent iron witness would tell a different story if it could. Young Preston Norell, observing this, put a cautionary finger on his wife’s bare elbow and nodded with his eyes toward Eva. Katy broke off in confusion. “Did my husband do that?” Eva demanded, facing her now directly, with a tone of impeachment. Katy blushed and hesitated. Everyone had turned toward her; there was an expectant silence in the kitchen as the colonists waited to see how this first crisis would be met. It was not a friendly atmosphere but one of suspended commitment. “Watch this!” said Taub’s eyes prophetically to Susan; at the door, someone hushed a member who demanded to know what was happening. The interest, for the spectators, centered on Katy’s character. With anyone else, it would have been a simple matter to say No or Yes and make an end of it, but the struggle she was having to pronounce a ready disclaimer was visible even through the soot on her expressive features. She did not dare to say Yes,
though this was what nature urged on her, and she feared that a strong No would imply a previous lie. “It was only an accident,” she said finally, in a feeble and unveracious voice. “Somebody was careless and left the oil turned up without lighting the stove.”

Preston Norell’s long fingers dropped from his wife’s arm, and he pushed his way out in disgust. For those words,
only
and
somebody
, he wished her in hell; he was sick and tired of a wife who could not bear to have people believe that she had flooded a stove which in fact she had not flooded. “Who cares!” he exclaimed aloud in a veritable frenzy of boredom. Katy’s vanity he did not object to; indeed, he found it entertaining, but the irresolute repetitiousness of her character, the perpetual see-saw between intention and execution, illustrated so banally in this incident, reminded him of his mother, a well-meaning woman whom he disliked. This produced in him the disagreeable sensation of having been born married, though in fact he had celebrated his second wedding anniversary only a few days before. A nomadic and restless temperament, he had felt a deep-going antipathy to Utopia and the suggestions of finality it conveyed: Katy had teased and persuaded—they must go and live for others, she insisted, in the same tone of pretty conviction with which she demonstrated the absolute necessity of a new dress or an apartment which his salary could not afford. As usual, he had allowed himself to be reconciled to a commitment, which bound him more tightly—the freedom stressed in the manifesto seemed
to him a very ethereal entity compared to the freedom of movement he renounced when they entered the gates. Now, the
contretemps
about the stove, the querulous morning mood of the colonists, the failure of breakfast to materialize, the lack of sportsmanship of his wife, combined to bring on an attack of the most violent claustrophobia—he struck off across the lawn, going he knew not where. His fury was out of all proportion to the cause that had provoked it; he had left his wallet in their cottage; he was dressed in shorts and sneakers; his job was gone and his apartment sublet to a war-worker: in an hour he might relent, but the need to be
elsewhere
was stronger than common sense. Someone called after him, but he paid no attention; the other colonists and the environs were included in his anger with Katy; he thought of Utopia simply as a place in which it would be impossible ever to escape from her, a multiplication of marriage or its projection into eternity.

She was following him out now; he could hear her footsteps running behind him; she caught him just beyond the lawn, her face distorted with tears, which he could envision with perfect distinctness while keeping his eyes averted. “Forgive me,” she cried. “Forgive me!” Plainly, she was not going to pretend, as she sometimes did, not to know how she had offended; the others were watching curiously, and he perceived, with a certain savage satisfaction, that she felt she must deflect him from whatever course he was planning, before their rupture was public. “Go in and get the
breakfast,” he said sternly, shaking his arm free. “Pull yourself together. You disgust me.”

Her sobs instantly grew louder, and he threatened her with his eyes. Her condition awoke no pity in him; he had seen it too often before; at the same time, a certain politic instinct cautioned him not to drive her to a point where she could no longer control herself, for suddenly he was not sure how he wished this quarrel to end. Arrested in his trajectory he became conscious of the practical difficulties of leaving, and the humiliation she would suffer if he should do so moved him to compunction. Feeling nothing but distaste for her as she stood there before him, he nevertheless foresaw a state in which she would be pitiable, poor derelict thing, just as he remembered, without any particular interest, a moment when she had been lovable, only the night before. At bottom, he felt responsible for her, and it was the very strength of this feeling that made him detest her now. He remained silent therefore and waited for her sobs to cease, fixing her with a schoolmaster frown and tapping his foot impatiently. “Go back,” he commanded at length, when her breath began to come more easily. “If
you
will,” she stipulated childishly, but at the very suggestion of bargaining, all his hatred revived. “No,” he said, shaking his head rapidly several times, the blond hair gleaming in the sun. “Go.” “But you’ll come soon?” she persevered. He shrugged his shoulders in half-concession; he would promise nothing verbally.