The Outsider (56 page)

“But there are others who are worse than Communists,” Cross told Sarah. “The Communists are kittens; but there are tigers in the jungle.”

“What do you mean?” Sarah asked.

“Communists are trained and organized; but there are men, their equals, who have never been broken.
They
are more dangerous than Communists!”

“Well, I hate 'em,
hate
'em
all
!” Sarah hissed.

“If you hate them, then you'll never understand them,” Cross explained.

“Why in hell would I want to understand them?” Sarah demanded.

The doorknob turned and Menti, Blimin, and Hank reentered the room. Blimin came straight to Cross and went to work.

“Say, they tell me you were a friend of Gil,” Blimin said.

“That's right,” Cross answered.

“And you knew Hilton?”

“Not as well as I knew Gil.”

“Is this your first time to become acquainted with the Party?”

“That's it.”

“What do you think of our Party?”

“Well, I doubt if I know it well enough to form a worthwhile opinion,” Cross hedged.

“Could I ask you a direct question?”

“Of course.”

“Lane, are you now, directly or indirectly, verbally or organizationally, by proxy or on your own behalf engaged in anti-Party activity?” Blimin let the words roll neatly off the tip of his tongue.

Cross rose from the side of Eva and faced Blimin.
How could he tell this man something that would set his mind at rest, and yet not leave in him the impression that he was evading anything.

“You don't have to answer unless you want to, Lane,” Blimin said.

“I'm hesitating in order to give full weight to what you've asked me,” Cross said.

The Communists were at last boldly leaping into an area where the police had feared to tread. His relation to the Party was the reverse of his relation to Houston. The essence of the Party was an open lawlessness and it could smell lawlessness in others even when it could not identify it correctly. What tactic could he use here? His first move should be to find out how much they suspected and the degree and intensity of their seriousness.

“Mr. Blimin, I suppose this is as good a time as any for us to have a showdown,” Cross began. “What are you suspecting me of? Why are you posing all these vague and roundabout questions?”

“Blimin's not a man to play with,” Menti reminded Cross.

“We're careful in the Party, Lane,” Blimin said. “And we don't know who you are. You are a close friend of Eva; Eva is close to us, and so you are close to us, but we don't know you. I'd like to see you account for yourself, to put it frankly. We've been trying to get a line on you, and the more we try, the less we find. You don't add up. What do you think of things? How do you feel? To our Party, these questions are of paramount importance. Our Party is under attack from many quarters. You show up suddenly on the scene, and two of our best leaders die under questionable circumstances and you are nearby…Naturally, the question arises:
Who is Lionel Lane?
What organization does he belong to? What are his interests? Who are his friends? What ideas
does he hold? Now, Lane, I'm here to listen to you. I'm an old man and I'm a pretty good judge of men. If you're honest and on the up and up, I'll be able to tell it, feel it. If you're hiding something, I can tell that too. Is what I'm asking fair?”

“It's fair,” Cross conceded.

“Are you willing to talk?”

“Of course,” Cross laughed. He knew that Blimin could not drag his secret from him; his past was safe; his past was himself. “I know nothing of the ideology of the Party.”

Blimin's face changed; he stood; his eyes grew hard; when he spoke his words were strident and underlined with a tinge of viciousness.

“I'm not talking about ideology. You're a man with the ability to grasp situations. I know that…You know goddamn well what I'm wondering about you.”

“Well,” Cross drawled, “I know you know I'm a stranger—”

“No; no!” Blimin slapped his hand through the air with a gesture of disdain. “I mean this—Your appearance in our midst coincides with death and violence! I'm talking to the point now…In the eyes of the Party you are under
suspicion
.”

“You suspect me of what?” Cross asked boldly.

“Of almost anything and everything,” Blimin stated his case.

“And what do you expect me to do about that?” Cross egged him on.

“Clear yourself of suspicion, or we will take measures to see that you do not remain longer in our midst,” Blimin said.

“This is vague,” Cross argued. “I'm guilty, you say; but you don't say what I'm supposed to be guilty of—”

“You're dodging, Lane! Right now you're guilty of
evading my questions—Look, you can't play 'possum with us. You're dealing with experienced men. You are supposed to have a background that would make you acceptable to us, but you've not revealed it. We don't understand you, and we don't like to be with people we don't understand. The world in which we live is much too dangerous for us to tolerate you a moment longer.”

“Look, for Christ's sake,” Cross begged. “I've not had a chance to say anything to anybody yet…Gil died suddenly; he was the only high-ranking member of the Party I'd talked to.”

“Lane, stop trying to make me believe that you are naïve!” Blimin shouted. “I'm
serious
!”

Eva rose; anger shone in her eyes.

“Comrade Blimin—”

“You keep quiet!” Blimin ordered. “This is no time for you to speak!”

“But—” Eva protested.

“You'll get your chance to speak to the Party later about all this,” Blimin said, waving a fat forefinger at her.

“Mr. Blimin, what do you want to know?” Cross demanded of him. “You must tell me, for I refuse to relate my entire life to you and let you pick out what part of my life you want and then brand me with it.”

“I don't understand all this,” Sarah mumbled uneasily.

“This is no concern of yours!” Blimin snapped at Sarah. His anger fully roused, he whirled on Cross. “Lane, what the hell ghastly joke is this you're pulling on the knowingest people on earth, the Communists? Who the goddamn hell do you think you
are?
What are you
doing
here? When we try to check on you, we run into a maze that leads nowhere. That's no
accident
. Are you a spy? Frankly, we doubt it; we thought so at first, but you've
not been close enough to us to get hold of any information. Don't you think, now, that we are scared of you. If we were, you'd not be breathing now…But we want to know…”

“Know
what?
”

“Are you a
killer?
”

“No!” Eva screamed.

“God in Heaven,” Sarah gasped.

The room was silent. He had at last been accused. Now, he had to act. First, he'd let the Party know that he knew what the score was in the world. He'd make them feel that maybe they could use him despite all the vague clouds of suspicion around him. He would make use of Blimin's urging him to talk to make a bid to them.

“We've no evidence, you might say,” Blimin went on with his charge. “That's right; we haven't. But
you
are evidence. You come—death!
Why?
Lane, I'm accusing you of EVERYTHING! Now,
talk
for your
life!
” Blimin pronounced a provisional death sentence.

Cross laughed softly, went to the sofa and sat down, lit a cigarette, lifted smiling eyes to Blimin as he drew smoke deep into his lungs.

“Do you think I'm crazy enough to try to defend myself against a charge about which I know nothing? You say you don't understand me. Well, I'm going to talk, and
you're
going to listen. I'm not the kind of fool who'd let you push him into a position of defending himself against a charge of something he's never even dreamed of doing—If you make me do that, why, I'd really be somehow guilty—”

Cross rose, went to the center table and poured out a glass of water; he acted slowly, methodically, taking his time. I'm acting like Gil acted when he was trying to impress me, he told himself. He drained the glass,
turned to Blimin, and he confessed not as Blimin wanted him to, but as he felt it. It was as though he was not only speaking to Blimin, but to and for himself, trying to clarify his predicament in his own eyes.

“Now, Mr. Blimin, I take it for granted that you are a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, or you would not be here talking to me tonight, or rather this morning. It's half past three…Oh, no; you needn't bother to affirm or deny it. I assume you are here for your Party. Let's let it go at that. I'd like for you to take back a straight message to them. They may not like my answer, and I'm not going to try to couch it in terms that will please them. My answer is just simply my way of looking at things, my slant, if you want to call it that.

“One way, among a variety of others, of looking at what is happening in this world today is to view all modern history as being tied together by one overall meaning. And that meaning is this: to a greater or less degree, all human life on this earth today
can
be described as moving away from traditional, agrarian, simple handicraft ways of life toward modern industrialization. Some nations, owing mainly to their historical backgrounds, have already made this journey, have already, so to speak, exhausted their industrial potentials of development and are industrially overripe. I'm referring to nations like England, Japan, Germany, etc. In these nations the problem of the future structure of society and the question of what kind of faith will sustain the individual in his daily life constitute a kind of chronic spiritual terror.”

“Lane,” Blimin accused him, “you're evading my question—”

“You asked me what I thought and felt about things,” Cross shot at him. “Do you want to hear it or not?”

“But get to the point,” Blimin insisted.

“Are you in a hurry?” Cross asked. “If so, I'll talk to you some other time—”

“Get to the point, Lane,” Blimin said.

“This
is
my point,” Cross said. “Now, Mr. Blimin, as I said, other nations, such as China, India, and the vast stretches of Africa have hardly begun this journey toward industrialization. The human and physical resources of these huge nations, comprising as they do more than one half of the human race and more than one half of the territory of the earth, have been stimulated as much as retarded by the impact of Western imperialism; they were retarded inasmuch as they were captive peoples in the hands of the industrialists of the West who needed their physical labor and the natural riches of their soil to keep the giant industrial machines of the West going…They were stimulated to leave their tribal, ancestral anchorages of living by being sucked into the orbit of industrial enterprises operating under the management of whites in their homelands under their own eyes…The hands of the West reached out greedily for the natural resources of these quaint peoples, but, in reaching, they awakened black, red, brown, and yellow men from their long slumber and sent them, willy-nilly, hurtling down the road of industrialization…

“During the past seventy years, America, under the ideological banner of free enterprise, fought a bloody civil war and defeated its agrarian provinces and launched itself, with no pre-history and practically no traditions to check it, upon a program of industrialization the equal of which, in terms of speed and magnitude, the world has never seen. From my point of view, this industrial program could have been accomplished under any dozen different ideological banners. The ideas
were not as important as people thought they were; the important thing was the fact of industrialization. Of course, and it is understandable, the defenders of this industrial program justified their dazzling progress by claiming that an organic relationship obtained between their ideas and industrialization. But, really, there was none…

“Now, during the past thirty-five years, under the ideological banner of Dialectical Materialism, a small group of ruthless men in Russia seized political power and the entire state apparatus and established a dictatorship. Rationalizing human life to the last degree, they launched a vast, well-disciplined program of industrialization which now rivals that of the United States of America in pretentiousness and power…Again I say that what happened in Russia, just as with what happened in America, could have happened under a dozen different ideological banners…If you lived in Russia and made such a statement, they'd shoot you; and if you lived in America and made such a statement, they'd blacklist you and starve you to death…Modern man still believes in magic; he lives in a rational world but insists on interpreting the events of that world in terms of mystical forces. The simple fact is, the social cat can be skinned in many different ways. The coming history of the many new nations now launching their industrial programs will prove this to be true…”

“So!” Blimin exploded, “you sneer at our ideology? You ignore the role of the working class, hunh? You see no difference between Russia and the rest of the imperialist powers?”

“Mr. Blimin,” Cross said patiently, “I'm talking to you as one man to another. I'm propaganda-proof. Communism has two truths, two faces. The face you're
talking about now is for the workers, for the public, not for me. I look at facts, processes—”

“You're slandering—”

“Don't impute motives to me,” Cross insisted. “Am I condemning you and men like you for what you've done? You did what you did because you had to! Anybody who launches himself on the road to naked power is caught in a trap…You use idealistic words as your smoke-screen, but behind that screen you
rule
…It's a question of
power!
”