Trust (51 page)

"Youth Leader?" he repeated stupidly. (And Manning was already bald. And Henderson and Blackfield had daughters and sons. One of them was old enough to read
Uncle Wiggily.
Henderson said: "The old rabbit gentleman, if you want to know. That's who Uncle Wiggily is." And the others smiled down innocently at the brilliant grass. The tragically mutilated boys talked of their children: strange! It was not the spasm of vanity that pricked William. He believed he had a duty to exacting time; it made him hate philosophy. "Have sons!" the ghost of Allegra's father called from out of the sea.) "He's a bit long in the tooth, that fellow, to see himself in that category," William protested.

"He's Youth Leader anyhow, it's his title. Just like Manning's being a major."

She knew Manning. She had danced with him at his sisters' parties. "Manning, well," he said, "he earned his title in rather a different species of organization."

"Rather a different," she was quick to mock. "Now he can train gun-fodder for the reactionary imperialists, can't he? Rather a different!"

The country-air, the lawn-air, the air in the shadows of the school-founder's statue: he had pocketed it all in his clothes. It had the fragrance of fresh milk in a density of whiteness. He closed his eyes and saw points of yellow dandelions; he saw a waterfall of milk, and an old rabbit gentleman wearing a hat. "The fellow influences you," he accused, "he mesmerizes you."

"Because he can do anything, I've told you, in a political way. He's a sort of genius."

"He has no background."

"You're always looking to put people in classes!" she shot back.

"I don't put them there. It's where I find them."

"
We
think about a classless society."—She screwed on the top of her pen.

William argued impotently, "You let him be your ventriloquist in fact," and discovered, in the moment of opening his sight to the absence of dandelions, that he was wishing for a different life. Was it too late? was it too late? The barbarians were scarring her mind. O Allegra! He meant to have her back; he gestured at her closed notebook. "All mad ideas," he said. "Mad ideas attract you." But that was not the Way: the more he condemned, the stricter her scorn for him. "They won't last, these notions," he essayed.

"Nothing lasts," she answered speculatively. "That's the whole point in having a revolution—to see that nothing lasts."

"Is he planning a revolution? Is that it? He's going to overthrow the Government?"

"Who?"

"Your Youth Leader," he said: but with a secret daring danger in his caution.

"Well what do you think all the discussion is
about?
" she sneered. "Only naturally it's important to lay the ideological groundwork first. You just don't go out and start a revolution."

"Ah," William said. "He's not a mere hothead then."

"If you're going to be sarcastic—"

"No, no," he retreated, "I'm simply looking for information. You spoke of a camp. I believe it was a camp. —For what purpose?"

"I
told
you. To discuss ideology and things. To train for the future. They're talking about having a World Youth Rally—that's just an example of the kind of preparation we'd need. It would be all the races on earth congregated in one place."

"I see," William said. "You're not thinking of bringing all the races on earth down to your father's beach?"

"Oh William! Will you, will you? You'll let us have the estate then?" she crowed; he had given himself away. "Oh look, I don't mean for the Rally—the Rally's not till next year, and anyhow it's going to have a million people. It might be Moscow or it might be Stockholm, we haven't heard yet. But we're hoping for Moscow. It's the logical place to celebrate."

"Moscow," he repeated. "To celebrate what?"

"
I
don't know—I can't
bear
lawyer-questions. I guess peace and freedom, things like that. Revolutionary things. Because the world's changing!" She flew out of her chair. "All we want is the camp. Just for this one summer! There's no rush about that museum, it doesn't matter about that museum—it's a crank idea, that museum! Oh please, William. Just June and July and maybe August. Fix it up!"

"It can't be ‹fixed,'" he said thoughtfully. "There's the trust."

"The trust, the trust!" She whirled around him, spitting words. "I hate that trust!"

"I hate your camp," he said.

"What do you mean?"

They stood assessing one another.

"I mean it's abhorrent to me. It should be abhorrent to you."

"It's what I want," she said stubbornly.

"It won't last. It will burn itself out."

"Not the Movement!"

"Your devotion to it."

"My devotion is to justice."

"For whom?" he asked calmly; he was in control now; it was very like an examination before trial; he felt the root of his confidence.

"For the downtrodden! For the workers!" she threw out.

"And what about justice for your father?" he inquired.

"Oh what's that?"—impatient: as though he were a fool.

"To fulfil his plan. Not to betray his wishes. Not to betray the trust."

"The trust again! A piece of paper! He was rich, now he's dead:
they
don't need justice, the rich and the dead. You see?" she said sourly, "That's just the difference between the capitalists and us. It's the workers
we
think of."

He was against argument—as much dispute with a cloud. But resignedly he said, "Then you don't think far enough. You don't think beyond sensationalism into sound economics." He finished: "The conversion of the estate will open jobs that never existed before."

"Jobs for fish!" she scoffed.

"Jobs for men."

"Pie in the sky!"

"What an adept you are," he said tiredly.

"You're reneging. It's just that you don't
want
the camp."

"No," he agreed. "I don't want it."

"You don't want anything," she said acidly.

He looked at her. Her eyes shimmered like a pair of teacups.

He said, "Have the camp. Just as you wish."

But he felt her confusion. He felt her suspicion. "June and July and August?" she demanded.

"June and July and August," he assented.

"All the house and all the grounds? The beach too? The woods?"

"All," he pronounced. "Just as you wish."

"You can really fix it?"

"I can ignore it. I can postpone beginning. I can wait," he said.

"Oh, if you wait for us to burn out you'll wait a long time!"

"Perhaps," he proposed, "you won't ignite at all."

"Pooh," she said. "People always catch fire at a camp, if it's enthusiasm you're talking about. It's because nowadays there are techniques. The Youth Leader knows them all. He can start anything from scratch."

"A firebrand," William said warily.

"Oh, an inflammatory, call him what you want,
we
don't care. It doesn't matter—just so long as there's progress. Call it sedition!—the main thing is having the camp.'

"I thought the main thing was peace and freedom."

"Well of course! But there's a different thing for each different condition. It's important to be practical and expedient as well as just idealistic," she gravely explained.

"I see," he took in. "Your Youth Leader is a clever man."

"I told you, he's a genius at political things. I
know
he looks perfectly ordinary, but really he's very smart. He makes everything pay for itself."

"Excellent," said William. "And so do I. Your father's property is worth something."

"It's worth only as much as what can be achieved in using it," she said neatly.

"On the contrary. It's worth what the trustee decides."

"Oh the trustee!" she jeered.

"Myself."

"Ha! You."

"—And if the trustee, on his own responsibility, arranges to dispose of the estate, even temporarily, against the terms by which he is bound," William said slowly, "he ought to have some compensation."

"Oh look! You're not asking for
rent?
" she said in disgust.

"No."

"Well I don't know
what
you're asking for. I can't understand that gobbledygook, it's too impersonal. Are you giving us the camp or not?"

"On a condition."

"I thought sol It isn't rent? We can't pay rent, you know. They never would've asked me to ask you if they thought you'd be that materialistic."

"They aren't materialists themselves then?"

"
Dialectical
materialists. It's different"

"Ah," William said.

"Then what is it? What
is
it?" she persisted. "You said you want something, and now you won't say what."

"Oh I want something," he remarked vaguely; he was aware of a quick red heat behind his vision; he feared he would stammer. "I want loyalty," he said finally.

"All right, but after all it isn't what you call a
betrayal,
it isn't being disloyal to my father just because—"

But he interrupted. "I don't mean your father."

"You said loyal—"

"To me."

She gazed. She understood. "To you? What a euphemism! How funny you are, William! You're scared of a few tents!"

He could not speak.

"No free camp, no free love! One or the other! How funny! Is
that
what you want? A sort of bargain?"

"Put it as you please," he said hoarsely.

"But it's a
bribe,
" she cried, humiliating him with an access of laughter.

It was a bribe; he meant to keep her. He looked on her zealousness as some curious erraticism of his own; it was not that he permitted—rather it was that he did not dare to forbid. He meant to keep her. It was a bribe. Yet who was to judge who had succumbed to whom? He bribed for love, she for zeal: it was a bargain they had struck. The odor of the contract-seal invaded obscurely: as the price of keeping her trustworthy, what would he not have bartered? So he gave in, and gave up—only, he warned, for June and July and August—the dead man's trust.

And in June and July and August the tents went up; and in June and July and August they came, the campers; and in September and October and November they came. And in November the son of Armenian immigrants came, imploring his livelihood; and in January came again; and there, in February, in a morning wind, behind the empty tents beating on poles frozen immobile in die ground, abandoned by the campers who now slept on cots in the house, upstairs and downstairs and along all the narrow corridors, there within earshot of the planning meeting for the Moscow March For A Better Future, the son of Armenian immigrants (whose father and mother had seized the confusion of war to leap like fish from the oppressive fist of Moscow toward the sea's escape) cut the future out of his neck and fell without grace among leaves, rusting their rust with the knife's rust and the special rust of a young man's blood when air has turned it brown as leaves.

The knife was rusty from stem to point. It had lain the whole winter on a stone. All summer they had cleaned fish with that knife. All summer they had fished, and cracked open clams pried from under rocks in the little cove, and every night sang—O illusion of illusion! thought William—with a fine robustness around a campfire. William saw it—the fire—and it smote him like a theory. It was artful, and it was artless, and he supposed it was another of the Youth Leader's contrivances, like the uncaptained cooking committee, everyone
taking turns, and then the hideous mass feeding, like cattle in a bam. But the jolly fire and the jolly songs obscured the meanness of it all—the cots, even in the gate-house, beside which he had to leave the car; and the noble gate bent, as though it had been swung on for a game; and the road blocked with cartons. He looked into one; it was heavy, and filled with cans of peas for the next day's cooks. Then he heard the singing, and thought it was girls' voices only, because of the lifted thinness, like a light hammer on far far metal; but when he halted in the oak-clump at the top of the hill the sound thickened and mingled with darker sounds, and it was the men who carried the words. So he gave in to the path; it took him sullenly downward toward the shadow-blotted fire, and a whitish smoke that the moon clarified, and a braid of smoke that divided black from black across the water, beginning from the beach and smearing out for the middle of the sea: it was the moon's trail, as liquid-ivory as though pressed that moment from an udder. And meanwhile the singing assaulted the air, imposing joy on the night's heat. A stereotype of illusion! What did Allegra want here? Now gladly she slept in the house, but when her father had asked her to sleep in it she would not; she would not live there; now the house was given away to the mob and she lived in it with the mob. What, what? Why? The song said: "I dreamt I saw Joe Hill last night"; it said: "alive as you and meee"; it said: "I neverrr died, said heee"—and William stopped to see the life of the place, all as Allegra had promised it, but troubled with a plague of falsehood. They had put the fire in the rose-garden: the trellises hung weighty heads by the hundreds, like a gallows. The roses were not for night; they dangled ashamed in the artifice of the camp-fire, and their clots of sweetness fell guiltily and steadily, like a strangely delicious and dangerous gas. On the black lawn the singers had thrown themselves against the dampness, form by form, leg by leg; tangles, it seemed, of lovers; and then, without warning ta the trespassing eye, torso and head and arms of Allegra—on the margin of the fire, feeding it a stick as though it were a dog that might run with it and return. And the little loops of flame ran with the stick and returned, then ran again; then came tamely, then suddenly reared up barking; and in the tall light that the quick high fire built, William saw the naked back of a Negro, with lean jutting shoulder-blades; and against this Allegra, wearing over her blouse a man's shirt, sat propped, easily and lightly, spine on spine, close close against the man, the thickness of a thread between their two skins. William called her name. She sang and tickled thé fire and did not hear. He called her name, but the absurd noise streamed to its climax and overwhelmed him. He felt dumb; he felt deaf. He felt he had fallen in among brigands, vagabonds, gypsies, robbers, beasts; a roiling, lazy, clownish lot of deceivers. And Allegra? Was this what pleased her—to sit chanting on the cold ground of her father's ruined garden like a Hindu on a patch of burlap? She offended him; she outraged him; she insulted him. "Is this it? Is this it?" he said to her, and she, startled, knocked with a knuckle on the brown man's bony back as on a door, to make an opening for him to come. So he came, and sat like the rest of them with his knees in a mound before him, and sat in the middle of their thievish hilarity, and grieved for the spoiled grass, and the unpruned trellises almost audibly cracking, and the lush waste of rose-heads (his mind ranged them nobly in milk-glass jars on the window-sills at home, stacked instead with Allegra's abandoned notebooks) : agitatedly he took in how a month of unguarded unruly summer had smothered with jungle his vision of what had been before. Jungle and jungle and jungle: he saw the Negro laugh without circumspection, and like a savage put passerine fingers on the round belt of skin inside Allegra's openly hanging sleeve—and she jumping away as though violated: "Hugh, it hurts!" He had forgotten, and pressed her tender sunburn. Brigands, vagabonds, gypsies! A fellowship of savages: but "No," Allegra said, "of philosophers. You don't know how to see us, William." He scowled at her "us"; she left him out. And again he pleaded, "Is this it? So this is it? The air that makes you happy? What you want? And how long will you want it?" "Until I don't want it any more," said his wife. "I won't come again," he told her meditatively. "You said that the time before." "I won't come again, though." "Yes you will. You want to sneak up to see what we do to the property. You don't trust us," she said into his ear, like a secret. It shamed him, the demeaning act: into his ear, as though he were a conspirator, and cared only for the property, and not for his own fate.