The Oasis (16 page)

Ultimately, Utopia would fail; that was to be expected. But it might survive for many months or for years, if the production of a commodity more tangible than morality could be undertaken. Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations; and the market for it was uncertain. Cheese, wine, books, glass, furniture—idly Katy’s mind considered the possibilities a factory might offer, certain that somewhere in this practical realm lay the colony’s true security. But she said nothing aloud, for it seemed to her presumptuous to come forward with a panacea. This was not her part. Moreover, it was still too early. Much remained yet to be suffered, many failures, many humiliations. The colony must settle like a house onto its foundations, creaking and groaning and sighing. Certain visitors must leave it. In the warm sun her eyelids began to droop. Leo’s plan, she remembered; the pamphlet—half-starting up in fright and then sinking back, as she recalled that they had not yet betrayed it; not a day had elapsed since its proposal. The sun beat down on her eyelids, making a red darkness, and suddenly, on the screen of her vision, a scene from the future was projected. She saw Jim Haines, whom she had been missing, as she suddenly realized during the last hour of the picnic, dressed in his city tweed suit, walking in a pair of orange-brown shoes with a peculiar sidelong gait toward the shed; the light was grey—it was early in the
morning. “Hello, there, Katy,” his voice mumbled as if directly into her ear. “Glad I came across you. Meant to mention it earlier. Martha and I are leaving.” And then immediately the rear of the Haines’ nondescript black car was disappearing bumpily up the driveway, the trunk partly open and a kiddie-coop tied with rope and a lumpy bag of laundry protruding. As Katy stood watching, endeavoring to call, “Stop,” the struggle for articulation brought her back to consciousness. She knew at once that she had been warned of a clear and present danger. Jim Haines was about to abandon them, like a sorely beset husband; the doubt, the hesitation, the scruple had worn out his stock of magnanimity. And yet if he went, all went; the man willing to be shown departed, having seen enough. She made a movement to rise to go to find him; appeasement, explanations, cajolery could hold him a little longer. Her husband’s fingers, squeezing her own gently, deterred her, as if sentient of her thoughts. Haines could not be held; equivocal, slippery, indeterminate, the citizen of open opinions evaded the theoretician’s grasp and returned stealthily to his habits, as if to a gentleman’s club. On the wide canvas of the meadow, crowded with bright, grotesque types, the apostles of a Brueghelesque vision, eating, drinking, disputing, elongated or vastly swollen, she saw the average man stealing out of one corner of the picture, a guilty finger to his lips. And rising apologetically from nearer the center, Joe, an itinerant harvester, was sharpening his scythe, tarrying briefly before the journey to new
fields of conquest. Who would remain at the banquet? Drowsily, she began to count on her fingers: Macdermott, Susan, Francis; Preston, Danny, Leo. Taub? she asked herself; then confusing her fingers with her husband’s she lost track of the number and assentingly fell asleep.

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