The Oasis (12 page)

“Supposing they don’t want to come, Leo?” insinuated John Aloysius Brown, with such an affected air of
smiling and subtle scholasticism that no one paid any heed to what was really a sensible objection.

“Hear, hear!” shouted Joe, silencing him and jumping dynamically from his seat. Everything half-articulate in himself, his humanitarian feeling, his Americanism, his Jewish sense of the melting-pot, his respect at the same time for a variety of cultures, with each man worshipping his own gods without interference, he saw suddenly clothed in glory by the poet’s gift of expression. The tears stood in his eyes as he considered the beauty and simplicity of this idea and the lives it might have saved if someone had only thought of it sooner. “You’ve got a great business head, my boy,” he declared. “Bring the consumer to the goods, that’s telling ’em.” His admiration for Leo’s plan paid full tribute to its practicality, but this implied no derogation of its idealistic intent. “The internal market,” he repeated, wonderingly. “That does it!” “Think of the housing developments,” someone else put in, half-seriously. But Joe was not joking. “Yes,” he said, nodding thoughtfully. “There’s a billion dollars’ worth of business right there.” He felt as though this were the moment that had been promised him from the instant he first heard of Utopia and perhaps from the instant of his birth. His day of fulfillment had come, and if he himself, like Moses, were never to see the Land of Promise, he at any rate tonight had glimpsed it from this mountain-top, like Moses on the mountain of Nebo. In all his weeks in the colony, this was the first truly Utopian suggestion he had heard.

“Not bad,” said Taub, concedingly, when the business man went to press him for his opinion; they had been friends for nearly three weeks. “Not
bad
?” cried Joe. “What are you talking about? It’s great.” Taub protruded his full lower lip, reflecting. “An interesting propaganda scheme,” he admitted. “Propaganda!” Joe demanded, unbelievingly, his grey face paling and contracting, as though with a physical pain. He made a short aggressive movement toward Taub, and Susan believed for a second he would strike him. “It’s something to won
toward
,” she explained, in a soothing voice. “No congressman would ever vote for such a thing,” she elucidated. “You know how
shamefully
they acted about the DPs.”

“Pressure,” said Joe. “Promotion. Private enterprise could help.” He turned the idea over in his mind. “Business is pretty backward,” he twinkled an eye at his audience, “but we’re the boys that get things done.” He turned suddenly to Leo, who had begun to move about restlessly, like a performer who feels out of his element, now that the show is over. “There was a little too much socialism in that talk of yours,” he remonstrated playfully. “Listen to the old fogey,” he added, raising his hand to his mouth, in a vaudeville stage-whisper to Eva. Eva bridled. She had been having a wretched time here. Her plump little sybaritic feet had been swollen from almost the first day; she had caught poison-ivy all along her white arms, still smooth and womanly at fifty; her fingernails had cracked from the hard water; she detested a double bed; but more
painful still than these afflictions, was the sense that her husband was making a holy show of himself before all these younger people. Having no interest whatever in the arts, though she did not object to piano music, she nevertheless felt that she knew how to comport herself in an artistic atmosphere, a conviction of authority which she had derived principally from the movies and magazine-reading. Artists, she knew, were sensitive people who surrounded themselves with beautiful things, and the sensitiveness of her pampered little body, her love of material comfort, she took as evidence that she herself possessed a latently artistic temperament. She saw nothing in the behavior of the Utopians to confirm her preconceptions, yet the fact that quite frequently in the public rooms she heard conversations she could not understand overawed her to the extent that she felt mistrustful for Joe, whom she considered as ignorant as herself and far less dexterous in concealing it. “If he would only be quiet,” she ejaculated in an undertone to the minister’s wife, who was the only person she felt wholly in accord with. “He’ll pay for this tonight,” she promised, with a sigh, and for a moment her well-preserved face held a hint of the furies, though the retribution she had in store for him was simply a digestive disturbance, the result of too much excitement. “He pays for it every time,” she added. There was an appropriateness, seized though not fully analyzed by Eva, in the fact that Joe’s body, which he refused to coddle, should prove to be her ally, and her allusions to its behavior suggested a
wealth of knowledge more intimate and exclusive than love.

“Private enterprise?” Leo inquired, his alert head tilted to one side as if he were listening for a new music that might be drawn from these old syllables. He had the virtues of gravity and sweetness, accompanied by a nimbleness of mind that found inspiration in the most commonplace remarks. “Well, Joe,” he said, “let’s see,” and he linked arms companionably with the older man, prepared for a long discussion. At the same time, there was something merry and quizzical in his face, which admonished his listener that conversation was an art. “Privateering?” he speculated. “That, too, is in the tradition.” And very rapidly he sketched out a plan for a covey of small frigates, manned by individual enterprise, to conduct rescue raids on the European coast. “If we get the co-operation of the State Department (and you’re quite right, business can do it) we land the passengers in New York Harbor. If not,” he waved his hands airily, “there are other places in the Americas.” And his mercurial fancy, working supplely with historical materials, at once created a new image in which the War of 1812, the old slave raids on the African coast, the secret rearmament of Palestine, Henry Ford’s peace ship, the exploits of smugglers and pirates, caves, dark inlets, row-boats with muffled oars, furnished a solid mass of precedent shot through with the gold of romance. Joe once again was charmed, but the doubt implanted by Taub caused him, after a moment of contemplation, to look up suddenly at Leo
with a frown and catarrhal sniff of suspicion. “Is this on the level?” he said.

“You think it’s not practical, Joe?” Leo answered him, almost tenderly, a light caress in his voice. “You think it can’t be done. I recognize your objection. It must be the oldest in history. You remember the story of Columbus. And there was Archimedes and the airplane. And Dunkerque, you remember, was described as a military impossibility. Every daring invention …” He paused to smile faintly. “Sex, surely, must have been the first. What a ludicrous action if looked at from a rational standpoint. Many of the philosophers complained of it.”

Joe motioned him to stop. He was a modest man and there were ladies present; moreover, the asceticism of his nature inclined him to agree with the philosophers—like many virile business leaders, he was sexually recessive. “You’ve proved your point,” he said. “All right, let’s get busy.” The other colonists turned toward him. Many of them had been moved by Leo’s first proposal to feel a fresh stirring of political hope. The second proposal they had dismissed as merely fanciful, and in fact even the most visionary of them, the Norells, the Macdermotts, and Nelly Boardman, the woman illustrator, who was drunk, suspected that about the whole evening there hung an element of japery, for they knew Leo well enough to recognize that there was nothing dogged or persistent in him. He was not earthbound like themselves; he parted easily from a notion when it proved inconstant and often
grew bored with his theories when someone else tried to unite him to them in a marriage of practice. This opinion of his political seriousness, naturally, was held even more emphatically by the realist group.

Yet, despite this, and despite a certain discomfort which his readiness in oratory induced in them (the joke about sex was self-plagiarized), an altruistic fervor in the colony was kindled by what he had said. Most of the Utopians, no matter how selfish, had been in the habit of working at least part-time on behalf of others, whether as teachers, as editors, or as simple entertainers; even Taub considered that he had had an educative function to perform in the world down below. They had supposed that their altruism would have full play in the cooperative work of the colony and in the example they would set to the world, but the truth was that, having identified themselves whole-heartedly with the enterprise, they had lost the sensation of sharing, and hence it seemed to many of them that their life here on the mountain-top was almost too hedonistic, since they were enjoying a happiness which had become an end in itself. Their withdrawal from the world had appeared legitimate, when a war which they could neither avert nor dominate threatened Western civilization, but now that the war held off they began to pose once again the question of alternatives, and to ask themselves whether this haven, which they had so readily constructed for themselves, could not in some manner be enlarged until a retreat from war became indeed a counter-attack upon it.

Leo’s plan seemed as good as another. It was at least a starting-point and each man in his own mind quickly began to modify it to suit his own notion of the possible. Macdermott, in one part of the room, was proposing a pamphlet to set forth Leo’s ideas to the small public of intellectuals whose names he retained in his files. Jim Haines envisioned an open letter to his former publisher—short, terse, factual, to be illustrated by a huge balance sheet comparing the cost of Operation Peace (as he provisionally titled it) with Operation War. Susan imagined a campaign of letters and telegrams to Senators and Representatives. Ed Jackson suggested a hook-up with the World Federalist people. Taub wondered whether the idea could not be grafted onto the mind of some prominent personality (a journalese term that had become dear to him). Desmond thought of a diocesan letter; Danny Furnas, of working with the trade unions. The capture of a college president indicated itself naturally to several, and the radio announcer kept jumping up and offering to return to the air under their sponsorship.

But when a roll call was ordered to distribute the work of these proposals, an enormous number of practical obstacles to doing anything whatever suddenly made themselves felt. There was a rush of volunteers for typing, mailing and filing, but the originators of the key suggestions began, one by one, to find reasons why their ideas were unworkable. Haines, with a certain shambling embarrassment, got up to explain that the Open Letter, on which everyone had, above
all, been relying, would require the help of a research-girl, not to mention a financial expert: he did not have the Marshall Plan figures here or the details of our military loans; the shipping costs would have to be calculated, and the fees of the technical advisors—in short, he had been too hasty. Mac’s pamphlet, he suggested, would be much more to the point. Katy Norell, when called upon, had an abrupt recollection of certain uncomfortable interviews in the office of her college president; she could write to him, she supposed, she said doubtfully, but surely there was someone else who would be able to approach him more easily. Ed Jackson was obliged to admit that his connection with the World Federalists was rather tenuous; it might be better, on second thought, to try the United Nations. Susan still declared herself ready to compose a letter to her Congressman, but unfortunately she had forgotten his name. Danny Furnas knew the names of several of the younger trade union chiefs; they, however, did not know his. “You’re pretty thick with those boys, Jim; maybe you could help me out.” Jim Haines’ dark rumbling voice spoke easily. “Can’t say as I am, Danny.” Everyone in the room became instantly certain that he was lying. Desmond, who had buried his fine head in his hands, savagely, as if wrestling with his demon, suddenly looked up. “I would be glad,” he murmured politely, but with an air of Irish
hauteur
and coldness, “if anyone wishes it, to drop a short note to the
Commonweal
.” The secretary scribbled briefly in his book, but the immediate proposals in hand, when the roll
call was finished, had shrunk to a single suggestion, which it was within their own power to accomplish; that Mac should get out a pamphlet, with the help of Henry and Preston, outlining Leo’s plan. There was a painful silence. No one, not even Mac himself or Eleanor, had any real confidence in the efficacy of this idea. How many pamphlets, remarked Preston, had not Mac got out in the past, with the sole result, as far as he could see, that the dining room he now stood in contained fifty not-very-charming people. “Perhaps the pamphlet will influence
us
,” he drily suggested.

“Why not drop the whole idea?” asked John Aloysius Brown, rather maliciously. “We’re too cut
off
up here.” Taub, seeing the way the wind was blowing by the noncommittal and evasive faces, promptly withdrew into his shelter. “Better call it off,” he decreed. But the Macdermotts felt immediately offended at the implications of this advice, though it accorded with their own inner weariness as they saw themselves once again confronted with the unwieldy machinery of the world as-it-was-constituted which had worn out their youth and patience as side by side, with so little assistance, they had struggled in vain for leverage. It was as if Leo’s plan, by appearing so deceptively simple and natural, had led them back into the old impasse and abandoned them to their own devices. Yet the suggestion that they were unimportant and powerless, they would not accept from another. “Too small for you, eh, Will?” Mac demanded. But as he looked around him his pugnacity quickly deserted him. He felt old
and tired. “Well, of course,” he said sadly, “if nobody wants it …”

Katy and Susan, in unison, cried out vehemently in reprobation. “We do,” they insisted, covered with shame for themselves and for the company at large. Their sudden loss of energy had been the result of a collective awakening from a day-dream. For a short half hour, everything had seemed so easy. People had appeared to them infinitely malleable, simply the instruments of their plan. The Congressman in Susan’s consciousness had had no need of a name; he existed in a vacuum equipped only with a desk, at which to open the letter which he had been conjured up to read. Katy’s college president had been simply a rubbery outline, which she could stretch to her measure. And any doubts she had experienced as to her ability to do this in practice had been lulled to rest by her confidence in the influence which would be exerted by others, as though all the public figures and prominent “personalities” would yield compliantly together to the ardent temperature of the meeting, like wax melting in the sun. When the stab of Haines’ defection had pierced this joint assurance, reality had all at once by contrast assumed a character infinitely hard, impermeable, and the Congressman, for example, from being a nothing, a receptacle, became an entity so resistive that to obtain his name from a newspaper became a task that seemed to Susan for the moment a veritable labor of Hercules. But now that the faintheartedness of the membership had reached really
scandalous proportions, their feminine sense of propriety rallied them to indignation. “I thought we were all agreed,” began Katy in her classroom manner, “that Leo’s idea had merit.” She paused for rhetorical effect and, when no one contradicted her, continued with a sarcastic precision which she had learned from her old Latin teacher, and which sat like an antique hat on her impetuous and still-girlish delivery. “In that case, we might do it the honor of working for it ourselves.” Here she carefully directed her gaze away from the vicinity of Jim Haines, for whom, as a matter of fact, she was busy constructing excuses, as for some favorite male student who was inexplicably delinquent in his work. To Katy’s mind, Jim Haines figured as the pivotal member of the community; he represented the normal, and the others turned anxiously around him, like the satellites of a sun-king. Though he seemed unaware of this pre-eminence or too boyishly reticent to take notice of it, the fact was that nearly all the members had set themselves out to please him, not because he had been more successful than themselves in the world down below, but because, with his deteriorating resemblance to an Arrow Collar ad, his moody air of dissipation and long-limbed Lincolnesque melancholy, his shambling gait and diction, he typified the middling sensual man of democratic persuasions to whom the appeal of Utopia was beseechingly addressed. Everyone considered it a miracle that he was here among them, full of domestic habits and the know-how of the ax and the monkey-wrench, the
eternal father of the family, busy with small repairs, hospitable with the whisky and soda, large-minded and impatient of women, whom he treated with ceremonious gallantry. And though there was some vague speculation as to what exactly could have persuaded him to make this hegira with them, on the whole it was felt that this was one of those things that it was better not to inquire into too closely, lest analysis “vanish” him from their company, like Cupid under Psyche’s taper. Operation Peace, as first sketched out by him, had seemed an almost incredible bonanza, and the group, when disappointed of it, had done its best not to appear crestfallen and to act as if what had happened had proceeded not from a man’s will or the lack of it but from some irreproachable natural order—it had been really too much to hope for, Katy and Susan had murmurously agreed.