Trust (52 page)

Oh, his own fate! It was to stand astride a cleft in the rock; a fault creaking wider by the moment. Quickly he had to choose, or else fall to the limits of vacancy: Allegra solidly on one side, a fresh empty field dn the other. He leaped—his fate leaped, his will leaped, every imaginable force of urgency leaped: for Allegra. It was Allegra he wanted—she who taunted him with wanting nothing at all on the crust of the world. He wanted her, but obscurely altered; he could not say how: to be just as she was, but qualified—the vitality without the mockery, perhaps; the sober stern sureness without the improbable commitment—he did not know. "Oh, there,
now
they're at it," she said, aroused; "watch them, William, if you came to see sinister rites!"

The Negro yielded another cannonade of laughter to the frosty air. "Who said a bar sinister had any rights?"

"What's a bar sinister?" demanded Allegra.

"A saloon with a bad reputation."

"Oh,
Hugh!
" she whimpered, faking peevishness. And then: "Is it, William?"

He began feebly, "It's a term of law—"

"Then never mind;
don't
explain it—you get so long-winded when you start on law, William. Anyhow I don't care. I only care about what has to do with real things that happen, don't I, Hugh?"

"Real things that happen," said Hugh, obligingly. "Virginia reel things."

"What?"

"That's what they're doing."

"No they're not, it's that Highland business."

"They're all the same," said Hugh, "derived from your primitive tribal ancestors. I bet the Virginia reel used to be a rain-dance."

"Oh for Pete's sake! If there's one thing it does in Scotland is
rain,
" Allegra said in disgust. "Sometimes you're so
arrogant
—my God, it's insufferable."—Oh, just as she was! Just as she was! The energy of her hauteur charged and charmed. Her malevolence, her spite: they drew William like spells and sparks; like arrows of wind; like a golden collar. She bit, but she gleamed. She was seized with wishfulness. The wishfulness gripped and turned her the way a lathe grips and turns, shaping, shaping. She was incomplete; she was an experiment in search of a potter. Then it was not too late to alter, to qualify; to
have
her. And meanwhile on the lawn the campers had risen because of the cold, and were rubbing on grass, and stamping numbly with both feet so that a tremor seemed to muse and loiter in the ground after each blow; and two by two between a column of hand-clappers they bounded and slid; and then all rotated mysteriously, shrieking out a kind of breathlessness that did for a tune: it loosed a barbaric shudder in the trellises.

"Do you do this all the time?" William asked. "Every night?"—because it seemed to him that even the dance was a tool, and had the power to shape and shave, and could lop her awry.

"No—sometimes we do laundry."

"Or pudding," said the Negro.

"We have lots of jobs," Allegra said: with a snap of practicality in her teeth. "Everyone does everything. You just go ahead and do whatever falls to you."

"Ah," said William; he was looking awkwardly for a tone to take. "That's your Equality, I suppose."

"Not quite," said Hugh. "We never really get them equal—some always end up lumpier than others. You meant the puddings? You couldn't have meant the races?"

"Sly! Then you ought to mix the batter harder," Allegra said, performing a culinary frown. "It all depends on how hard you stir."

"You
do
stir," Hugh said. "You stir
me,
girl."

"Ball and chain," Allegra said. "Beware."

"Who?"

"Him."

"Is that the one!"

"I
told
you, didn't I?"

"You didn't tell me. You kicked me. But I guess that's a quibble. I
do
declare," said Hugh. "I do absolutely declare. Do you duel?"

"I beg your pardon?" William said.

"Sir, I ask if you duel. Choose your blades."

"Blades of grass," Allegra tittered, chewing one.

"I am in love with your wife," said the Negro.

"You see?" Allegra said helpfully. "Now you've
got
to kill him, William."

"That's your Justice, I suppose," the Negro said.

"There! That's William to a T," Allegra cried, admiring the other's mimicry. "He's all for the dead hand and things."

"And life, liberty, and the pursuit of property," said Hugh; "add that."

"Oh pooh! Really, is there anyone vainer than a black man? Talk of property!" Allegra said. "Nobody's pursuing you any more."

"That's what
you
think, girl. Enoch is."

"Is he? What'd you do?"

"It's what I didn't do. Sin of omission. Those notes on the Scandinavian organizations I promised him."

"Haven't you sent for them yet!" Allegra marveled. "If it depends on you we'll never get to Moscow. —Lazy and shiftless you are."

"Terrible indolent race, us Swedes," the Negro said. "Here, gimme my shirt to sweat in. That's another reel starting—carries me back to old Virginny, where my old black grand-mammy used to mix arsenic juleps for the Squire.
There
was a revolutionary!" He jumped to his feet and offered a slim hand to William. "You want to come, man? You look's though you could
use
an aeration of the blood vessels. 'Legra won't, she's got the curse."

"Go ahead, William," Allegra urged. "You know how to do it. You can kill him in the do-see-do, when his back is turned. —All
right.
Damn it, Hugh,
take
your filthy shirt."

He plucked it on the fly—"My corpuscles are as white as the next man's, miss"—and swung off into the pack of dancers.

"Hugh's awfully defensive about being educated," Allegra explained.

"Is he?" William said.

"Terribly. Being so defensive is what makes him act that way, sort of self-attacking. You know. It's because he's so defensive."

"Is he educated I meant."

"That's his whole trouble, he's
got
a Ph.D.—he's older than he looks, lots of their men are. Anyhow he's afraid people will get to thinking on account of the Ph.D. that he's forgotten all about the sharecroppers down South."

"And he hasn't?" William said drily.

"Well look, if he had, he wouldn't've joined the Movement, would he? It's social justice we're
after,
isn't it?" Indignation lit her; triumph lit her. "And you know what? Hugh's practically the only person in the whole Movement who can write Swedish! At least around here he is, isn't that remarkable?"

"I suppose it immensely increases his value," William murmured. "When the millennium comes the black races will recite the Eddas to the white races."

"Don't be nasty, William. We have lots of correspondence with Stockholm, I told you."

"I thought it was Moscow that was the Mecca," he said; his knees were beginning to ache.

"That doesn't mean we can't have anything to do with the Stockholm groups, does it? We have groups everywhere," she announced positively. "All over the world. Even in South America and Africa. It's because we're against the imperialists. You have to be really international to fight the imperialists."

He sighed. "Allegra."

"Hugh sings in Russian too. But Enoch said his accent's no good."

"I think it's been enough, Allegra. I think you ought to come home," William said.

"I
am
home."

He could not contradict her. "Then I think you ought to come with me."

"
You're
not going anywhere."

"And you?"

"I'm going everywhere!"

"It's definite then," he said.

"It's definite about Moscow anyhow. As soon as we got coordinated with that Swedish bunch. Enoch's trying to negotiate a date with them. The Norwegians are O.K., it's just the Swedes, they don't see why people don't like to go North in winter."

"I didn't mean Moscow," he said heavily.

"You asked if it's
definite—
"

"That this is what you want. This kind of thing." He waved out at the patterns of the reel and the trellises croaking with every thump and the voyaging moon, and meanwhile Allegra shivered; her skin was sleeveless now, and broken out into tiny moles of cold—it was the wind that blew up from the beach, full of sea. "You don't know what you want," William said.

She kneeled forward. Then she stood. "But I know
that
I want," she told him. "I want and I want and I want and I want."

"I won't come up again."

"You will. I bet you will."

He said quietly into the diminishing fire, "I don't like the life."

"Or the liberty. It's the liberty especially you don't like. All you care for is the property, what I said before."

But he cared for his fate. It was his fate he cared for.

"They've chiseled initials in your great-aunt's monument," he said.

"Stupid stone anchor! It's not her monument, it's nothing at all. Anyhow she was a loon; didn't know one season from another."

"Neither do you."

"What?"

"Know one season from another. —I have nothing against what people call idealism—"

"And
you
call it what?"

"Folly. Entrapment. Time-wasting. Escapism. Illusion. Illusion above all."

"But you have nothing against it!" she scoffed.

"It shows a spirited will, I don't deny it. All that's charming. Charming. But it's for children. It's for children. I say it's enough, Allegra. It's time you came away."

"Time!" she threw back at him.

"Time," he said again. "All things in their season."

"Well, am I ripe yet? Am I supposed to drop from a tree like—like I don't know, a coconut?"

"Allegra," he said.

"Don't try and sympathize, William. You're even nastier when you sympathize."

"It's enough. It's time you came with me."

"What for?"

"To stay."

"What for?"

"To be what you ought to be."

"I'm not what I ought to be?"

"You're self-indulgent. It's a fantasy you live here. You prolong it. The world is different."

"The world is different," she repeated.

"The world is not a Utopia full of reels and puddings."

"Of course not. Utopia is the house in Scarsdale."

He did not acknowledge this. "You're too old to play at Brook Farm."

"Utopia! Mecca! Brook Farm! Where do you think you are, William?"

"I like to think I am where I belong."

"
I
like to think I belong where I am."

"You won't come then?"

She gave a cunning smile. "Afterward. When we get out of here. Right now we're settled in."

"Afterward?" he said wonderingly.

"There's so much to do it wouldn't be fair to leave in the middle. But I'll come if you want. I'll come in October."

"You mean September. The end of August, the beginning of September," he said.

"But we're settled
in,
you see, and Enoch thinks he needs at least another month. It isn't easy to find headquarters large enough, especially once you're settled in."

He said gravely, "The contractors are coming in September."

"Oh put them off another month! You can do it. You can do anything of that sort, William, if you want to. You
can.
"

"The county has hired the men already. They're arriving in the middle of September."

"Oh the men! Who cares about the men!"

"It isn't a thing to do, they're fine museum people—"

"Another month, William. What's another month? The museum will be forever, won't it? So what's one month to forever?"

Afterward, she said; forever, she said. And afterward she would come to stay with him forever.

"And meanwhile?" he asked.

"Oh, meanwhile I'll be good."

This seared him. "I didn't suggest—" he began, but wheeled from it in distaste. He had forgiven her. He was certain he had forgiven her. "What is this Enoch?" he said instead.

"A Jew."

"I mean who is he."

"Well, you said what. I thought you knew
who,
for goodness' sake. He's the Youth Leader."

"Is he old or young?"

"Old, like you. But you've seen him! Oh look, you don't have to be jealous of Enoch! Enoch's nothing."

"You speak as though he were everything."

"Because he is. He's a genius, I've explained it to you a hundred times: I mean at political thinking. That makes him nothing and everything at the same time."

"Is that a sample of your dialectic?" he said bitterly.

"He's everything to the Movement. To himself he's nothing. There's nothing in him that doesn't belong to the Movement, that's all. It isn't dialectic. It's the way he is."

"A prophet."

"Oh, a prophet!" Her dark mirth wooed his dismissal. "There, now you can go in peace. Nobody can be jealous of a
prophet,
can they? People don't elope with prophets, do they? I told you you didn't have to be afraid of a few tents!"

He went, though not in peace: he drove onto the hooded deck of the thick-sided little ferry, glistering even at night with paint new as its franchise, an oval pink toy bobbing absurdly in the River Styx (though it was only a bay in the Sound) while Charon grumbled at his empty boat. William kept to his car, and kept to the wheel; the pilot kept to his high cab and kept to the wheel in it; but the ferryman came and put an elbow on the fender and complained, with an old green captain's eye on the tamely kicking moon-white water, that he had been cheated: "First they said they'd have the place finished by the middle of the summer; now they say fall, and meanwhile to keep my franchise I got to take her across and back at least once a week. I got to take her across and back, and nearly empty, except for a kid or two from over there, or I don't protect my franchise, and still no museum over there, and never mind gas and oil, I got to pay my pilot, don't I?" And whined against the fender. An old river man, he said he was. He had a dog called Shep that barked from beginning to end of the journey. He had hoarded up his life to put it all into the Pink Lady.

And still no museum over there. William put off the contractors; he put off the curators; he put off the county officials; and did it all for the sake of elusive afterward and risky forever, and did it because Allegra had told him she would come to him in October. And in October she came, but only to take away a bundle of sweaters and woolen skirts and to shop in the city for fifty blankets and to beg him to see about letting them have coal for the furnace.