The Outsider (32 page)

“It's late,” Gil exclaimed. “We must be going, Eva.”

“Oh, dear, yes,” Eva said. She turned to Sarah. “Darling, thank you for the wonderful dinner.”

“It's nothing,” Sarah said; she could not lift up her eyes.

Gil asked Cross, when he was close enough to him to talk in a whisper: “Can I give you a lift to 116th Street?”

“Sure,” Cross said. He longed to talk to Bob, but felt that it would be better to do so out of the presence of Gil. He rose, burning with protest at what he had seen and heard.

Bob pretended to be brave; he grinned, wagged his head, and crooned: “Boy, the Party's tough, hunh? It's a great Party—”

“That's the spirit,” Gil said, going for his overcoat.

“I don't like it,” Sarah said, taking a pile of dirty dishes into the kitchen.

“She'll be all right,” Bob sought to apologize for her.

“I
won't
be all right!” Sarah shouted at him, her face twisted with anger.

“Darling, let's go,” Eva said.

Cross shook hands with Bob and went to the kitchen door to say good-bye to Sarah. The door was closed and when he pushed it open he saw Sarah sitting with her head bowed. Her shoulders were shaking; she was weeping. She had not heard him open the door, and Cross closed it softly and joined the others. He followed Gil and Eva silently down the stairs to the street. Not a word was spoken until they had all gotten into the car and were rolling over the lumpy drifts of snow. Cross was next to Eva and his nostrils were full of the delicate perfume that she wore. He stared straight ahead of him, feeling that his life had at last touched something that stirred him to his depths…He was not angry or outraged, just deeply thoughtful, full of wonder. He had witnessed a scene of naked force in which obedience had been exacted through fear and the intensity of the emotions involved shook him.

“Well, what are your impressions, Lionel?” Gil asked, smiling and looking ahead of him.

“It's interesting,” Cross said; he did not want to talk now.

“Is that all?” Gil asked, chuckling.

“It's impressive,” Cross conceded.

“I didn't expect you to see that tonight,” Gil said soberly. “I'm just wondering if you understand it correctly. If you got the right interpretation?”

“I got the right one,” Cross said tersely.

“You have a big future ahead of you,” Eva said in a
neutral, far-away tone that made Cross wonder what she meant.

“You'll be all right,” Gil said.

“Here's 116th Street; you can drop me here,” Cross said, relieved.

The car slowed and Gil and Eva looked solemnly at Cross.

“Well, Lionel, have you changed your mind?” Gil asked.

“Absolutely not!”

“Then we can expect you?”

“When do you want me?”

“Tonight. Now. Tomorrow. This week…Whenever you want to come,” Gil said.

“Give me the address,” Cross said.

“It's 13 Charles Street, second floor,” Gil said.

“I'll be there about ten in the morning,” Cross said. “I've one suitcase, that's all.”

“Right,” Gil said.

“Good night, Lionel,” Eva said.

Gil waved his hand and the car moved off through the dim, snowy streets. Cross stood a moment, looking at its red taillight disappear. He mounted to his room, undressed, and lay on his bed. There was a smile on his face as he stared up into the darkness. They think I'm a little child, he told himself. I don't mind the way they act in organizing…I don't mind the wild way they give out their decisions…I don't even mind their self-righteousness…But that naked force…Why? At the mere recollection of Hilton's biting tones, he sucked in his breath. They didn't
have
to treat Bob that way…Bob'll follow
any
strong person…You can take his hand and lead 'im…

He sat on the side of the bed; sleep was far from him. “Once you get that kind of attitude structuralized in an
organization that goes on from year to year, how can you ever get it removed…?” he asked out loud.

Cross felt that he was at last awaking. The dream in which he had lived since he had fled Chicago was leaving him. The reality about him was beginning to vibrate: he was slowly becoming himself again, but it was a different self.

Finally, toward dawn, he turned over on his side and slept like a rock for the first time in many weeks.

C
ROSS WAS AWARE
of every echo of meaning surrounding his decision to live with the Blounts. He had accepted their invitation in bad faith which was now almost a congenital condition with him; but he realized that his adversaries were also acting in bad faith, a bad faith of which they were cynically proud. Bad faith, though reprehensible and regrettable, was not unknown to Cross; not only had he been long guilty of it in his personal relations, but he was convinced that bad faith of some degree was an indigenous part of living. The daily stifling of one's sense of terror in the face of life, the far-flung conspiracy of pretending that life was tending toward a goal of redemption, the reasonless assumption that one's dreams and desires were realizable—all of these hourly, human feelings were bad faith. But when Cross saw bad faith being practiced as a way of life, when he saw men mobilizing the natural hopes and anxieties of other men for their own selfish ends, he became all but hypnotized by the spectacle.

He had no illusions regarding the complexity of the situation into which he was voluntarily entering. His past life had prepared him for participating in such com
pounded duplicities. His temperament made him love to understand those who thought that they were misleading him and it was fun to use his position of being misled to, in his turn, mislead them into a position where they thought that he was misunderstanding them. He knew, of course, that such complicated games carried a risk of
his
misunderstanding those whom he was supposed to understand, but he was willing to shoulder such handicaps. Perhaps we might both misunderstand each other, he mused.

Need for money was not pulling him into this. He had no hankering for publicity, for to be known might mean the return of Cross Damon from the grave, and that would blast his life anew. Also his was not the itch to right wrongs done to others, though those wrongs did at times agitate him. And, above all, he possessed no notion of personal or social wrongs having been done to him; if any such wrongs had existed, he felt fully capable of righting them by his own lonely strength and effort.

It was an emotional compulsion, religious in its intensity, to feel and weigh the worth of himself that was pushing him into the arms of the one thing on earth that could transform his sense of dread, shape it, objectify it, and make it real and rational for him. Logic was guiding his sense of direction, but his emotional needs were dictating the kind of directions he chose.

His affinities with the turbulent instincts of Gil and Hilton were undeniable; he was, in a manner, their brother, just as Houston was his. His difference lay in his intractability being at bottom sharper and more recondite. Too full he was of personal pride to regard himself as an exploited victim; his was not the demand that he be given his share of a mythical heritage. His was a passion to recast, reforge himself anew, and he was certain that Gil and Hilton had once in their lives
felt what he was now feeling, that his reaching out for another pitch of consciousness had haunted them just as now it plagued him. But they had resolved their tangled emotions in the rigid disciplines of Communist politics, thereby ejecting from their hearts the pathos of living, purging their consciousness of that perilous subjective tension that spells the humanity of man. And now they were warring to slay in others that same agony of life that had driven them to the wall.

What malevolently psychological advantages were theirs in the waging of their war! Who best could track down criminals than reformed criminals! Gil and Hilton were spiritual bloodhounds on the trail of men whose spirits had not yet been broken as theirs had been. Since they had been defeated, they had decreed that defeat be the lot of all…

It was not the objective reality of the revolutionary movement that was pulling so magnetically at Cross; it was something that that movement had and did not know it had that was seducing his attention. It was its believing that it
knew
life; its
conviction
that it had mastered the act of living; its
will
that it could define the ends of existence that fascinated him against his volition. Nowhere else save in these realms had he encountered that brand of organized audacity directed toward secular goals. He loathed their knowledge, their manners, their ends; but he was almost persuaded that they had in a wrong manner moved in a right direction for revealing the content of human life on earth. He knew that their bristling economic theories were simply but vastly clever fishing nets which they dragged skillfully through muddy social waters to snare the attention of shivering and hungry men; but many men, the best of them, would not yield their allegiances on purely economic grounds and he knew that the Party knew this.

While packing his suitcase, he was struck by an idea. Suppose Gil was right in assuming that the Party was justified in coercing obedience from others purely on the basis of its strength? What was there, then, to keep an individual from adopting the same policy? Apparently nothing save cunning and ruthlessness…

“Gil'd want to kill me if he knew how I felt,” he chuckled, lumbering down the stairway with his suitcase.

A yellow sun was flooding the buildings with a pale light that had no warmth. He headed for the subway and had gone but ten yards when the image of Bob's face rose before his eyes. Yes! How was Bob making out? Had he kept the Party's decision? Instead of going to Gil's place, he rode uptown and made his way to Bob's apartment. Bob answered the door.

“Speak of the devil!” Bob greeted him. “Come in, man. We were just talking 'bout you. You got your suitcase—Going to Gil's, hunh?”

“Yeah.” Cross looked searchingly at Bob whose face wore a mask of cheerfulness. “You seem all right after what happened last night.”

“Yeah, man,” Bob boasted. “That ain't nothing—”

“The hell it ain't!” Sarah's voice boomed from the living room.

“Man, Sarah's mad,” Bob said, becoming crestfallen at the sound of her voice. “Go on in.”

Bob followed him and the moment Cross stepped into the living room he saw Sarah's angry face.

“Hey, Pretty,” Sarah greeted him in cold tones.

“I thought you were going to laugh at me today,” Cross said.

“I ain't laughing at no sonofabitch today,” Sarah replied.

“She don't understand that the Party has to have dis
cipline,” Bob explained. “Women think we men can do as we like—”

“You joined the Party to organize, didn't you?” Sarah demanded.

“Yeah; sure, Sarah. But listen—Lemme explain—”

“You ain't explaining nothing!” Sarah overrode him. “A white man held out a stick to you and said, ‘Jump!' And, by God, you jumped, just like any nigger—”

“Listen, woman! This is the
Party
! This—”

“But it's a
white
man's Party, ain't it?” Sarah demanded.

Bob turned to Cross and shook his head helplessly.

“Why don't they want you to go on with your work?” Cross asked Bob.

“He don't know,” Sarah answered for Bob. “They walk in here and tell 'im what to do, and he hates it, but he
obeys
! They don't even tell 'im why, but he
obeys
!” She glared at Bob. “Even in the South when the white folks lynched you, they told you
why
! You didn't agree with 'em, but, by God, they told you
why
!”

“Sarah,” Bob began, “the Party's an army—”

“Goddamn your Party!” Sarah blazed, leaping to her feet. “What in hell did I marry, a Marxist or a mouse? Listen, nigger, you're going to
organize
, you hear?”

“Baby,” Bob whined. “Look, Lionel's new to the Party—”

“Let 'im hear it all!” Sarah yelled. “Let 'im know what he's getting into.” Bitter tears filled her eyes; she turned to Cross. “All my life I've seen niggers knuckling down to white people. I saw my mama knuckling down when I was a child in the South. And nothing hurt me so much as when I saw a white man kick her one day…Know what I mean?
Kick
her! I said kick her with his
goddamn
foot. I was 'bout six; mama was serving in the white man's house; I was watching from the kitchen
door. Mama tripped and fell with the tray and boiling soup splashed all over her. But the white man wasn't worried 'bout that. Hell, naw! He was mad 'cause his dinner was spoiled, so he
kicked
her. It'll stay in my mind till my dying day…And everywhere I've looked since I've seen nothing but white folks kicking niggers who are kneeling down… Know why I don't go to church, Lionel? 'Cause I have to
kneel
in front of that white priest, and I'll be goddamned if I'll do it. Now, we're in the revolution and the
same
goddamn white man comes along. But he's in the Party now.”

“Baby, it's different,” Bob wailed.

“Don't tell me it's different; it's the
same
damn thing!” Sarah sat heavily in a chair and her head dropped; she seemed ashamed of her outburst. “Maybe the Party wanted you to expose yourself that way,” she began again in a reflective tone. “You're no good to the union, you're no good to the company, and, if you don't obey the Party, you're no good to them. They got you trapped—”

“Sarah,” Bob spoke solemnly. “A good Bolshevik obeys. Lenin obeyed, didn't he? Molotov obeys—”

“Then, honey,” Sarah sneered at him, “I want you to be one of them who tells the
others
to obey, see? Read your Marx and organize. Hunh?
That
scares you, don't it? They done put the fear of God in your soul!” She rose again, trembling with anger. “Listen, I'm working and helping to support you to
organize
! I'm feeding you to
organize
! Now, you either
organize
or
go
!” She whirled to Cross. “The Party scared the pee out of him this morning. He went to the Control Commission to find out why they didn't want him to go on with his work. When he got back here, he was sick—”

“I
wasn't
sick,” Bob protested, ashamed that Cross should know.

“You looked
green
,” Sarah said. “And when a man as dark as you looks
green
, he
sick
!”

Bob grabbed his head with his hands, sank into a seat; his body began to tremble. He was suffering, a wet rag billowing between the blasts of Sarah and the Party. Cross was unable to look at him; he stared out of the window.

“What are you going to do, Bob?” Cross asked patiently.

“Hell, man. I don't know,” Bob sighed.

“What do you
want
to do?” Cross asked.

Bob's eyes searched Cross's face as though seeking an answer there; he licked his lips and mumbled despairingly:

“I want to organize Negroes—”

“Well, why don't you?”

“You reckon I could do it? Reckon I ought to?” he asked sheepishly.

“You ought to do what you want to do,” Cross told him.

Sarah watched Bob with the cold eyes that only a woman can have for her husband. Cross knew that Bob would never win. Bob was too scared to act alone; he had to have a master. The Party had sunk its hold deep in Bob's heart and, if Bob left the Party, he would have to find another…

“I'm gonna stick to my own people,” he said heavily, his eyes glistening. He had run from one master to another: his race. “That's what I'm gonna do.”

“Then,
do
it, Bob,” Cross said. “I'll help you.”

“You want to help organize Negroes?” Bob asked eagerly, jumping to his feet.

“No. I want to help
you
,” Cross told him in clipped tones.

Bob was puzzled; he brushed the meaning in Cross's
words aside. He paced nervously with eyes full of anxiety. “One thing's got me worried,” he mumbled. “The Party knows I'm illegally in this country—”

“So what?” Sarah asked.

“Supposed they turn me in to the Immigration folks to get rid of me—?”

“The
Communists
?” Cross asked.

“Sure, man,” Bob said. “When the Party fights, they fight with everything.”

“They wouldn't dare,” Sarah said.

Cross felt that Bob's worries were farfetched. After all, was Bob that important to the Party? He rose to leave and Bob grabbed his hand in gratitude. Sarah followed him to the door. As Cross descended the stairs he wondered why some men wanted to be free and some did not, why some needed freedom and others did not even feel its loss when they did not have it.

After witnessing Bob's turmoil, he had doubts about going to Gil's. Was not Gil but another Hilton? And why did the Party demand abject obedience? He recalled Bob's having told him that the Party was “now your mother and your father”, which meant that if he obeyed, the Party would take care of him, but, if he disobeyed, the Party would destroy him. And he had not the right to know
why
he was obeying…Why blind obedience? Yet, upon reflection, he found some cynical merit in the Party's demand for it. If no reasons are assigned for a given command, then you cannot criticize, for you do not understand what you are doing. And if obedience without reasons is demanded for little things, it would hold, as a matter of ingrained habit, for bigger and more dangerous things…But why had the Party chosen that procedure? Had they found that men would
not
obey otherwise? That could hardly be true, for each day millions of southern Negroes obeyed southern
whites; millions of South African natives obeyed the white powers above them; millions of Germans had obeyed Hitler; and in most cases these millions had been given some fantastic excuse to justify the command of obedience. The Nazis tried to win the loyalty of their subjects by conferring upon them ornate titles, noneconomic rewards of various sorts, and by devising schemes of sport and joy. But the only motive that Hilton had held out to Bob was fear. Did the Communists
prefer
fear? He sighed and glanced out of the subway window just in time to discover that the train was slowing for his stop. Well, the answer to his questions was in Gil's apartment…