Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz

IN DREAMS BEGIN RESPONSIBILITIES

I

I think it is the year 1909. I feel as if I were in a motion picture theatre, the long arm of light crossing the darkness and spinning, my eyes fixed on the screen. This is a silent picture as if an old Biograph one, in which the actors are dressed in ridiculously old-fashioned clothes, and one flash succeeds another with sudden jumps. The actors too seem to jump about and walk too fast. The shots themselves are full of dots and rays, as if it were raining when the picture was photographed. The light is bad.

It is Sunday afternoon, June 12th, 1909, and my father is walking down the quiet streets of Brooklyn on his way to visit my mother. His clothes are newly pressed and his tie is too tight in his high collar. He jingles the coins in his pockets, thinking of the witty things he will say. I feel as if I had by now relaxed entirely in the soft darkness of the theatre; the organist peals out the obvious and approximate emotions on which the audience rocks unknowingly. I am anonymous, and I have forgotten myself. It is always so when one goes to the movies, it is, as they say, a drug.

My father walks from street to street of trees, lawns and houses, once in a while coming to an avenue on which a streetcar skates and gnaws, slowly progressing. The conductor, who has a handlebar mustache, helps a young lady wearing a hat like a bowl with feathers on to the car. She lifts her long skirts slightly as she mounts the steps. He leisurely makes change and rings his bell. It is obviously Sunday, for everyone is wearing Sunday clothes, and the street-car’s noises emphasize the quiet of the holiday. Is not Brooklyn the City of Churches? The shops are closed and their shades drawn, but for an occasional stationery store or drugstore with great green balls in the window.

My father has chosen to take this long walk because he likes to walk and think. He thinks about himself in the future and so arrives at the place he is to visit in a state of mild exaltation. He pays no attention to the houses he is passing, in which the Sunday dinner is being eaten, nor to the many trees which patrol each street, now coming to their full leafage and the time when they will room the whole street in cool shadow. An occasional carriage passes, the horse’s hooves falling like stones in the quiet afternoon, and once in a while an automobile, looking like an enormous upholstered sofa, puffs and passes.

My father thinks of my mother, of how nice it will be to introduce her to his family. But he is not yet sure that he wants to marry her, and once in a while he becomes panicky about the bond already established. He reassures himself by thinking of the big men he admires who are married: William Randolph Hearst, and William Howard Taft, who has just become President of the United States.

My father arrives at my mother’s house. He has come too early and so is suddenly embarrassed. My aunt, my mother’s sister, answers the loud bell with her napkin in her hand, for the family is still at dinner. As my father enters, my grandfather rises from the table and shakes hands with him. My mother has run upstairs to tidy herself. My grandmother asks my father if he has had dinner, and tells him that Rose will be downstairs soon. My grandfather opens the conversation by remarking on the mild June weather. My father sits uncomfortably near the table, holding his hat in his hand. My grandmother tells my aunt to take my father’s hat. My uncle, twelve years old, runs into the house, his hair tousled. He shouts a greeting to my father, who has often given him a nickel, and then runs upstairs. It is evident that the respect in which my father is held in this household is tempered by a good deal of mirth. He is impressive, yet he is very awkward.

II

Finally my mother comes downstairs, all dressed up, and my father being engaged in conversation with my grandfather becomes uneasy, not knowing whether to greet my mother or continue the conversation. He gets up from the chair clumsily and says “hello” gruffly. My grandfather watches, examining their congruence, such as it is, with a critical eye, and meanwhile rubbing his bearded cheek roughly, as he always does when he reflects. He is worried; he is afraid that my father will not make a good husband for his oldest daughter. At this point something happens to the film, just as my father is saying something funny to my mother; I am awakened to myself and my unhappiness just as my interest was rising. The audience begins to clap impatiently. Then the trouble is cared for but the film has been returned to a portion just shown, and once more I see my grandfather rubbing his bearded cheek and pondering my father’s character. It is difficult to get back into the picture once more and forget myself, but as my mother giggles at my father’s words, the darkness drowns me.

My father and mother depart from the house, my father shaking hands with my mother once more, out of some unknown uneasiness. I stir uneasily also, slouched in the hard chair of the theatre. Where is the older uncle, my mother’s older brother? He is studying in his bedroom upstairs, studying for his final examination at the College of the City of New York, having been dead of rapid pneumonia for the last twenty-one years. My mother and father walk down the same quiet streets once more. My mother is holding my father’s arm and telling him of the novel which she has been reading; and my father utters judgments of the characters as the plot is made clear to him. This is a habit which he very much enjoys, for he feels the utmost superiority and confidence when he approves and condemns the behavior of other people. At times he feels moved to utter a brief “Ugh”—whenever the story becomes what he would call sugary. This tribute is paid to his manliness. My mother feels satisfied by the interest which she has awakened; she is showing my father how intelligent she is, and how interesting.

They reach the avenue, and the street-car leisurely arrives. They are going to Coney Island this afternoon, although my mother considers that such pleasures are inferior. She has made up her mind to indulge only in a walk on the boardwalk and a pleasant dinner, avoiding the riotous amusements as being beneath the dignity of so dignified a couple.

My father tells my mother how much money he has made in the past week, exaggerating an amount which need not have been exaggerated. But my father has always felt that actualities somehow fall short. Suddenly I begin to weep. The determined old lady who sits next to me in the theatre is annoyed and looks at me with an angry face, and being intimidated, I stop. I drag out my handkerchief and dry my face, licking the drop which has fallen near my lips. Meanwhile I have missed something, for here are my mother and father alighting at the last stop, Coney Island.

III

They walk toward the boardwalk, and my father commands my mother to inhale the pungent air from the sea. They both breathe in deeply, both of them laughing as they do so. They have in common a great interest in health, although my father is strong and husky, my mother frail. Their minds are full of theories of what is good to eat and not good to eat, and sometimes they engage in heated discussions of the subject, the whole matter ending in my father’s announcement, made with a scornful bluster, that you have to die sooner or later anyway. On the boardwalk’s flagpole, the American flag is pulsing in an intermittent wind from the sea.

My father and mother go to the rail of the boardwalk and look down on the beach where a good many bathers are casually walking about. A few are in the surf. A peanut whistle pierces the air with its pleasant and active whine, and my father goes to buy peanuts. My mother remains at the rail and stares at the ocean. The ocean seems merry to her; it pointedly sparkles and again and again the pony waves are released. She notices the children digging in the wet sand, and the bathing costumes of the girls who are her own age. My father returns with the peanuts. Overhead the sun’s lightning strikes and strikes, but neither of them are at all aware of it. The boardwalk is full of people dressed in their Sunday clothes and idly strolling. The tide does not reach as far as the boardwalk, and the strollers would feel no danger if it did. My mother and father lean on the rail of the boardwalk and absently stare at the ocean. The ocean is becoming rough; the waves come in slowly, tugging strength from far back. The moment before they somersault, the moment when they arch their backs so beautifully, showing green and white veins amid the black, that moment is intolerable. They finally crack, dashing fiercely upon the sand, actually driving, full force downward, against the sand, bouncing upward and forward, and at last petering out into a small stream which races up the beach and then is recalled. My parents gaze absentmindedly at the ocean, scarcely interested in its harshness. The sun overhead does not disturb them. But I stare at the terrible sun which breaks up sight, and the fatal, merciless, passionate ocean, I forget my parents. I stare fascinated and finally, shocked by the indifference of my father and mother, I burst out weeping once more. The old lady next to me pats me on the shoulder and says “There, there, all of this is only a movie, young man, only a movie,” but I look up once more at the terrifying sun and the terrifying ocean, and being unable to control my tears, I get up and go to the men’s room, stumbling over the feet of the other people seated in my row.

IV

When I return, feeling as if I had awakened in the morning sick for lack of sleep, several hours have apparently passed and my parents are riding on the merry-go-round. My father is on a black horse, my mother on a white one, and they seem to be making an eternal circuit for the single purpose of snatching the nickel rings which are attached to the arm of one of the posts. A hand-organ is playing; it is one with the ceaseless circling of the merry-go-round.

For a moment it seems that they will never get off the merry-go-round because it will never stop. I feel like one who looks down on the avenue from the 50th story of a building. But at length they do get off; even the music of the hand-organ has ceased for a moment. My father has acquired ten rings, my mother only two, although it was my mother who really wanted them.

They walk on along the boardwalk as the afternoon descends by imperceptible degrees into the incredible violet of dusk. Everything fades into a relaxed glow, even the ceaseless murmuring from the beach, and the revolutions of the merry-go-round. They look for a place to have dinner. My father suggests the best one on the boardwalk and my mother demurs, in accordance with her principles.

However they do go to the best place, asking for a table near the window, so that they can look out on the boardwalk and the mobile ocean. My father feels omnipotent as he places a quarter in the waiter’s hand as he asks for a table. The place is crowded and here too there is music, this time from a kind of string trio. My father orders dinner with a fine confidence.

As the dinner is eaten, my father tells of his plans for the future, and my mother shows with expressive face how interested she is, and how impressed. My father becomes exultant. He is lifted up by the waltz that is being played, and his own future begins to intoxicate him. My father tells my mother that he is going to expand his business, for there is a great deal of money to be made. He wants to settle down. After all, he is twenty-nine, he has lived by himself since he was thirteen, he is making more and more money, and he is envious of his married friends when he visits them in the cozy security of their homes, surrounded, it seems, by the calm domestic pleasures, and by delightful children, and then, as the waltz reaches the moment when all the dancers swing madly, then, then with awful daring, then he asks my mother to marry him, although awkwardly enough and puzzled, even in his excitement, at how he had arrived at the proposal, and she, to make the whole business worse, begins to cry, and my father looks nervously about, not knowing at all what to do now, and my mother says: “It’s all I’ve wanted from the moment I saw you,” sobbing, and he finds all of this very difficult, scarcely to his taste, scarcely as he had thought it would be, on his long walks over Brooklyn Bridge in the revery of a fine cigar, and it was then that I stood up in the theatre and shouted: “Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.” The whole audience turned to look at me, annoyed, the usher came hurrying down the aisle flashing his searchlight, and the old lady next to me tugged me down into my seat, saying: “Be quiet. You’ll be put out, and you paid thirty-five cents to come in.” And so I shut my eyes because I could not bear to see what was happening. I sat there quietly.

V

But after awhile I begin to take brief glimpses, and at length I watch again with thirsty interest, like a child who wants to maintain his sulk although offered the bribe of candy. My parents are now having their picture taken in a photographer’s booth along the boardwalk. The place is shadowed in the mauve light which is apparently necessary. The camera is set to the side on its tripod and looks like a Martian man. The photographer is instructing my parents in how to pose. My father has his arm over my mother’s shoulder, and both of them smile emphatically. The photographer brings my mother a bouquet of flowers to hold in her hand but she holds it at the wrong angle. Then the photographer covers himself with the black cloth which drapes the camera and all that one sees of him is one protruding arm and his hand which clutches the rubber ball which he will squeeze when the picture is finally taken. But he is not satisfied with their appearance. He feels with certainty that somehow there is something wrong in their pose. Again and again he issues from his hidden place with new directions. Each suggestion merely makes matters worse. My father is becoming impatient. They try a seated pose. The photographer explains that he has pride, he is not interested in all of this for the money, he wants to make beautiful pictures. My father says: “Hurry up, will you? We haven’t got all night.” But the photographer only scurries about apologetically, and issues new directions. The photographer charms me. I approve of him with all my heart, for I know just how he feels, and as he criticizes each revised pose according to some unknown idea of Tightness, I become quite hopeful. But then my father says angrily: “Come on, you’ve had enough time, we’re not going to wait any longer.” And the photographer, sighing unhappily, goes back under his black covering, holds out his hand, says: “One, two, three, Now!”, and the picture is taken, with my father’s smile turned to a grimace and my mother’s bright and false. It takes a few minutes for the picture to be developed and as my parents sit in the curious light they become quite depressed.

VI

They have passed a fortune-teller’s booth, and my mother wishes to go in, but my father does not. They begin to argue about it. My mother becomes stubborn, my father once more impatient, and then they begin to quarrel, and what my father would like to do is walk off and leave my mother there, but he knows that that would never do. My mother refuses to budge. She is near to tears, but she feels an uncontrollable desire to hear what the palm-reader will say. My father consents angrily, and they both go into a booth which is in a way like the photographer’s, since it is draped in black cloth and its light is shadowed. The place is too warm, and my father keeps saying this is all nonsense, pointing to the crystal ball on the table. The fortune-teller, a fat, short woman, garbed in what is supposed to be Oriental robes, comes into the room from the back and greets them, speaking with an accent. But suddenly my father feels that the whole thing is intolerable; he tugs at my mother’s arm, but my mother refuses to budge. And then, in terrible anger, my father lets go of my mother’s arm and strides out, leaving my mother stunned. She moves to go after my father, but the fortune-teller holds her arm tightly and begs her not to do so, and I in my seat am shocked more than can ever be said, for I feel as if I were walking a tight-rope a hundred feet over a circus-audience and suddenly the rope is showing signs of breaking, and I get up from my seat and begin to shout once more the first words I can think of to communicate my terrible fear and once more the usher comes hurrying down the aisle flashing his searchlight, and the old lady pleads with me, and the shocked audience has turned to stare at me, and I keep shouting: “What are they doing? Don’t they know what they are doing? Why doesn’t my mother go after my father? If she does not do that, what will she do? Doesn’t my father know what he is doing?”—But the usher has seized my arm and is dragging me away, and as he does so, he says: “What are you doing? Don’t you know that you can’t do whatever you want to do? Why should a young man like you, with your whole life before you, get hysterical like this? Why don’t you think of what you’re doing? You can’t act like this even if other people aren’t around! You will be sorry if you do not do what you should do, you can’t carry on like this, it is not right, you will find that out soon enough, everything you do matters too much,” and he said that dragging me through the lobby of the theatre into the cold light, and I woke up into the bleak winter morning of my 21st birthday, the windowsill shining with its lip of snow, and the morning already begun.

THE WORLD IS A WEDDING

ONE: “WHAT DOES SHE HAVE THAT I DON’T HAVE?”

In this our life there are no beginnings but only departures entitled beginnings, wreathed in the formal emotions thought to be appropriate and often forced. Darkly rises each moment from the life which has been lived and which does not die, for each event lives in the heavy head forever, waiting to renew itself.

The circle of human beings united by need and love began with the graduation or departure of Rudyard Bell from school, just at the beginning of the great depression. Rudyard was the leader and captain of all hearts and his sister Laura’s apartment was the place where the circle came to full being. When Rudyard graduated, he decided to devote himself to the writing of plays. His aunt had suggested that he become a teacher in the public high school system until he had proven himself as a dramatist, but Rudyard rejected his aunt’s suggestion. He said that to be a playwright was a noble and difficult profession to which one must give one’s whole being. Laura Bell had taken care of her younger brother since he was four and she said then that Rudyard was a genius and ought not to be required to earn a living. Rudyard accepted his sister’s attitude as natural and inevitable, such was his belief in himself and in his power to charm other human beings.

Thus, in a way, this refusal to become a teacher and to earn a living was the beginning of the circle.

The other boys who truly belonged to the circle were also caught in the midst of the great depression. Edmund Kish wanted to be a teacher of philosophy, but he was unable to get an appointment. Jacob Cohen, recognized by all as the conscience or judge of the circle, wanted to be a reporter, but there were few jobs for newcomers. Ferdinand Harrap tried to be an author, but none of his stories were accepted, and he supported himself by directing a business agency. Francis French and Marcus Gross were teachers in the public high school system, although this was far from their ambition, Lloyd Tyler, known as “the boy,” was still a student, and Laura made the most money as the buyer for a department store.

The circle was astonished when Rudyard’s first long play was rejected by Broadway, for all had been certain that Rudyard would be famous and rich very soon. Rudyard had always been the one who won all the prizes in school and did everything best. Marcus Gross spoke fondly of the day, long ago and far away, when he had first encountered Rudyard in public school. It was the beginning of the new term and after the first hour Rudyard was regarded as a genius by the teacher and the pupils. So it had always been, Rudyard had been the infant prodigy, class orator, laureate, and best student. When Rudyard’s plays were refused year after year by Broadway producers the circle was perplexed, for his dramatic works seemed to them delightful and profound when he read them aloud to the circle. Edmund Kish recognized the weakness of the plays, the fact that Rudyard used character and incident merely as springboards for excursions which were lyrical and philosophical, so that the essential impression was dream-like, abstract, and didactic. But he liked the plays for just this reason, and his conversations about philosophy did much to make Rudyard concern himself with the lyrical expression of philosophical ideas.

Laura was disappointed and after a time she concealed her disappointment by speaking of her brother’s plays as just trash. Yet she was patient with Rudyard, delighting in the circle as such and hoping that among the new young men whom Rudyard was always bringing to the house there would be one who would want to marry her.

After five years of the depression, the hopes of most of the boys of the circle had faded slowly like a color or were worn thin like a cloth. Their life as part of the circle was their true life, and their lower middle class poverty kept them from seeking out girls and entertaining the idea of marriage. From time to time some of them became acquainted with girls and went out with them briefly, but since no one but Rudyard was doing what he wanted to be doing, marriage was as distant as a foreign country. Disdainful from the beginning of the conventional modes of behavior, their enjoyment of the life of the circle fortified and heightened their disdain.

When Laura began to doubt that she was going to get a husband, she began to drink, hiding the gin in the pantry when Rudyard tried to stop her. She drank on Saturday nights, the nights when the circle came to her house and was most itself, so that some of the boys spoke of “our Saturday nights.” When she was really drunken, she became quarrelsome and voluble, and what she said was an incoherent, but blunt utterance of the naked truth. The boys tried to seem indifferent to what she said, but the reason for her drunkenness was clear and painful. When the marriage of a boy or girl who had come to evenings of the circle was discussed, and when the news of an engagement became known, Laura cried out from the kitchen like Cassandra:

“What does she have that I don’t have?” Laura uttered this question again and again during the evening, amid other and like remarks.

Laura insisted in vain that her question be answered, and sometimes she placed her hands on her breasts lightly, as if in estimation, although when sober she was ashamed of any mention of sexual desire. Each newcomer or visitor renewed her hope, Laura invited him to come to dinner. Laura was full of great goodness and kindness, a goodness hardly concealed by her disgruntled and grudging remarks. She was unable to understand what was wrong. She lent the boys money and helped them in whatever they attempted, knowing that she was used by them and used most of all by Rudyard. She made petulant remarks, she said that she was a fool, but she always pressed herself forward to be helpful, typing Rudyard’s manuscripts which she declared more and more often to be just trash which she could understand less and less as Rudyard’s indulgence in lyrical philosophizing grew.

Thus on a Saturday night when the circle had long been in full being, Laura spoke loudly, crying out from the kitchen or uttering her sentences in the midst of a conversation.

“Tick, tick, tick,” she said as she carried a dish to the table for the midnight supper.

“What are you ticking about?” asked Edmund Kish, knowing very well that her answer would be an expression of unhappiness.

“O,” said Laura, “That’s just my life ticking away.”

“Can’t you stop being human for an evening?” asked Francis French, who did not like to hear of unhappiness.

“No, I can’t,” said Laura, “I never can, no matter how hard I try. I just keep thinking of the rotten truth, the dirty truth, and nothing but the awful truth.”

“We ought to remember,” said Rudyard, who was able to enjoy everything, “the profound insight stated in the sentence, ‘Joy is our duty.’”

“I don’t feel joyous,” said Laura, “and I don’t feel like forcing myself to be joyous, whether or not it is a duty. I don’t like life, life does not like me, and I am unhappy.”

“Laura is right,” said Edmund, seeking to show sympathy, “she has a right to her feelings. When I used to get peevish as a child, I would say: ‘What should I do? I have nothing to do?’ My mother always used to have just one answer: ‘Go knock your head against the wall’ was what my mother always said. She was a big help.”

“Tick, tick, tick,” said Laura, “that’s just life passing away, second by second.”

TWO: “HOW MUCH MONEY DOES HE MAKE?”

During the week, Edmund Kish had been visited by Israel Brown, the most admired of all the teachers known to the circle. Israel Brown was a man of incomparable learning. He was lean, tall, hollow-cheeked, and Christ-like in appearance. When he conversed, he spoke with a passion and rush such that one might suppose that the end of his life or of the world were in the offing. He did not seem to belong to this world and this life, although he appeared to all to know about everything in this world. He was a teacher of philosophy, but he touched upon many other subjects, ancient coins, legal codes, marine architecture, the writing of the American Constitution and the theology of the early Church Fathers. No matter whom he met and no matter where he was, Israel Brown rushed to tell his listener whatever his listener seemed to care about. He was able to correct and contradict whatever his listener said to him without offending him. He said hurriedly: “You will pardon me if I point out—,” and then told his listener facts about the subject which the listener for the most part did not know existed, or were known to anyone.

Thus on this day when Israel Brown stopped at Edmund Kish’s house to get the compendium he had lent Edmund, one of his most devoted students, he was introduced to Edmund’s mother and he spoke to her immediately with customary pace and passion, telling her all about her generation, the generation which had come to America from Eastern Europe between 1890 and 1914. He spoke of the causes of the departure of this generation from the old world, the problems and tricks of the ocean liner agencies, the prospects of the immigrants, the images of the new world which had inhabited their minds, the shortage of labor which had drawn them, and the effect of their coming upon social and economic tensions in America.

Mrs. Kish listened to Israel Brown amazed as everyone was who heard him for the first time, amazed and overwhelmed by his eloquence, his learning, and his ravenous desire to tell all that he knew. Edmund as he listened was amused by the dumbfounded look upon his mother’s face. She was an intelligent woman who had been a radical in her youth and she was not wholly bound in mind by her middle-class existence.

As soon as Israel Brown departed, Mrs. Kish breathed deeply as if in relief.

“You have just seen a genius,” said Edmund to his mother.

“How much money does he make?” asked Mrs. Kish.

This was the story with which Edmund, excited, came to the Saturday evening at the Bell apartment.

He was not disappointed. The circle responded with enormous joy, and immediately Rudyard started the analysis and augmentation of any news which was a loved practice.

“Your mother’s question,” said Rudyard, in a tone in which gaiety and a pedagogic attitude were present, “is not only brilliant in itself, but it suggests an inexhaustible number of new versions. Your mother has virtually invented a new genre for the epigram. Thus, whenever anyone is praised and whenever anything favorable is said about anyone, let us reply: ‘Never mind that: how much money does he make?’”

“Yes,” said Ferdinand, “there are all kinds of versions. We can say: ‘I am not in the least interested in that. Just tell me one thing: What’s his salary?’ Or if we want to make him look unimportant: ‘What you have just told me leaves me absolutely cold. What I want to know is: What are his wages?’ And then again ‘Precisely how much cash has he in the bank?’”

“‘How much is his yearly compensation?’” shouted Laura from the kitchen, preparing the midnight supper, but never failing to listen to all that was said.

“It is one of the most heart-breaking sentences of our time,” Jacob Cohen declared in a low voice, “and if it brings one to tears, the tears are obviously for Edmund’s mother and not for Israel Brown.”

“I don’t notice anyone refusing any money,” said Laura, bringing coffee, tea, and cocoa to the table, “except for Jacob.” Jacob had refused to accept an allowance from his father and he had refused a job in the family business in which his older brothers prospered exceedingly. He had explained that he was going to be what he wanted to be or he was going to be nothing.

“It is easy enough to do nothing,” said Jacob, seating himself at the dinner table. He did not like to have anyone’s attention fixed upon what, in his being, was most intimate and most important.

“The difficult virtue,” said Rudyard, “is to disregard the possibility of making money, to live such a life that making money will have no influence upon one’s mind, heart and imagination.” As he spoke, he was hardly aware that he was thinking chiefly of himself.

“You can’t write plays for money, you just don’t know how,” said Laura, “so you don’t have any temptation to resist: that’s no virtue.” Laura’s love and admiration of her brother did not prevent her from attempting to overthrow the attitudes in which Rudyard took the most pride. This was the way in which she tried to defend herself from the intensity of her love and the profundity of her acceptance of him.

Rudyard did not answer her. His mind had shifted to his own work, and he took from the shelf the manuscript book in which his last play was written, seated himself upon the studio couch, and studied his own work, a look of smiling seriousness upon his face.

The other boys were seated at the dinner table, slowly eating the midnight supper and rejoicing in Mrs. Kish’s question. Laura pampered each of them in his stubborn idiosyncrasy of taste. Edmund liked his coffee light, Rudyard liked his very strong, Ferdinand would only drink Chinese tea, Edmund insisted on toast, although most of them liked pumpernickel bread best of all. Laura provided what each of them liked best, which did not prevent her from being ironic about their preferences and assuming the appearance of one who begrudges and denies all generous indulgence and attention.

“How beautiful,” said Rudyard loudly without raising his gaze from his manuscript book, “and yet no one likes this play, not even my intimate friends. But in a generation or in fifty years, it will be cheered as the best dramatic work of the century!”

Marcus Gross strode in, his entrances being at once loud and founded on the assumption that he had been present all evening.

“The theatre in which your plays are performed,” he said, “ought to be named, Posterity.”

“Very good,” said Rudyard, “you may think that you are attacking me, but I regard that as one of the finest things ever said about an author!”

It was felt that this was a perfect reply.

Between Rudyard and Marcus an antagonism had long existed, excited for the most part by Rudyard’s open contempt for Marcus, who admired Rudyard very much, but was forced to conceal his admiration.

“You are absolutely safe,” said Marcus, responding to the laughter, “you are taking no risk whatever. We will all be dead before anyone knows if you are right or wrong.”

“I know now,” said Rudyard serenely, never admitting the small doubts which on occasion overtook him and suppressing his anguish at not being recognized as a great playwright.

“The fact is,” said Jacob half-aloud, thinking of the life which they lived, “we do not have very much of a choice. It is a question of your money or your life, the Mexican bandit’s question. We have a choice between doing what we don’t want to do or doing nothing.”

“Last week,” said Lloyd Tyler, the boy of the circle, and the most silent one, “my father bought his yearly ticket in the Irish Sweepstakes, and it all began again, just the same as every other year.”

He told them of the new dialogue between his parents, discussing the Irish Sweepstakes.

“What would you do, if you won one hundred and fifty thousand dollars?” Mrs. Tyler had asked her husband. The cruelest irony was in her voice, for she resented her husband very much because her life had not been what she had expected it to be. What she was saying was that he would not know what to do with a great deal of money.

“What would you do with it?” she said again for emphasis, disturbing Mr. Tyler’s careful examination of the evening newspaper.

“I would sleep,” said Mr. Tyler flatly and strongly, for he recognized this as a criticism of his powers and his way of life.

“But you sleep now,” said Mrs. Tyler, unwilling to be put off, “I never saw anyone sleep as much as that man,” she said to Lloyd who was trying to keep out of an interchange in which he recognized twenty-five years of feeling.

“It would be a different sleep,” said Mr. Tyler. “If I had one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, it would not be the same kind of sleep.”

“No one sleeps better than you do,” said Mrs. Tyler, but weakly, knowing that she had been worsted.

“What a triumph!” cried Edmund joyously. “Not even Swift would have made a better answer.”

“Yes,” said Rudyard, “we ought to strike a medal for your father, Lloyd. He has justified all of us.”

“I wonder what he would do with one hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” said Marcus.

“He would sleep the sleep of the just and the self-fulfilled,”

Jacob answered. “What does he have to show for his thirty years of work? He has nothing.”

“He has himself,” said Rudyard, who often chose to regard all things in an ideal light.

“He does not like himself,” said Lloyd, “he does not care very much for himself.”

“It is his own fault if he does not care very much for himself,” answered Rudyard.

“Is it his own fault?” asked Lloyd sadly, for he liked his father very much, “He thinks that he would see my sister and her husband and his grandchildren more often, if he had money, and if he had given my sister a dowry. He thinks that his son-in-law would think more of him and ask him to dinner more often.”

“In my opinion,” said Rudyard, using the phrase which was always the introduction of a dogma, “money has nothing whatever to do with the matter. Pardon me for being intimate, but I would say that the real cause of all the difficulty is that your father did not know how to make love, or your mother has never wanted to have your father make love to her. This is the true meaning of the fact that she is dissatisfied with him. Love is always the beginning of everything, that’s obvious. And perhaps we may go so far as to say, that if there had been satisfied love between your parents, your father would have prospered and made as much money as your mother wanted him to make.”

“That’s just an idea, that’s nothing but an idea. Money is the root of all good!” shouted Laura from the kitchen, helping herself to one more pony of gin as the visitors arose to depart.

“Everything is mixed in everything else,” said Jacob to himself, thinking of how much Laura desired to be loved.

THREE: “NO ONE FOOLS ANYONE MUCH, EXCEPT HIMSELF”

The human beings of the circle and the circle as such existed for Jacob Cohen in a way private to him. The other boys of the circle often discussed each other, but seldom thought about each other when they were alone. They came together in order not to be alone, to escape from deviceless solitude. But Jacob enjoyed the solitude of the morning and the early afternoon, during which he strolled through many neighborhoods, inspected the life of the city, and thought about his friends of the circle. They were objects of his consciousness during his solitude and in this way they existed in his mind like great pictures in a famous gallery, pictures which, however, were studied not merely for curiosity and pleasure, but as if they contained some secret of all pictures and all human beings. Jacob, thinking about his friends and walking many city blocks, was borne forward by the feeling that through them he might know his own fate, because of their likeness, difference, and variety.

This day of September as Jacob set forth was a day of profound feeling because the children went to school again for the first time. Jacob and his friends had prospered in school, and most of all at the university, in a way they never had since then. Now five years had passed and were used. All of them were in some way disappointed as they had not been in school, where each had been able to do what he truly wanted to do. The school had been for them a kind of society very different from the adult society for which it was supposed to prepare them.

Jacob had arrived at Central Park. To the west was a solid front of expensive apartment houses, in front of him was a grove of trees and an artificial lake, next to which were empty tennis courts. Jacob decided to sit down on a park bench and let the emotion inspired by the first morning of school in September take his mind where it would.

He soon found himself thinking, as often before, of the character and fate of his friends of the circle.

Francis French, who now belonged to the circle less and less, had been at first the most fortunate one and the one who impressed the official middle class most of all. He was an extremely handsome young man who spoke English with a perfect Oxonian accent which he had acquired without departing from the state of New York. His presence, his manners, and his accent had secured for him immediately after graduation an appointment as a teacher of English literature in the best of the city universities. He was clearly marked out as a young man with a brilliant academic future.

At the end of the first term, however, the head of the department, who had chosen Francis from among many, found it necessary to summon him and ask him about an anonymous note which accused Francis of immoral relationships with some of his students. In this interview Francis had need only of the good manners and tact which he had cultivated for long and with easy success. But in the shock of the confrontation, he did not reply that the note was untrue and that his friendships with his students had been misinterpreted. Instead of making this nominal denial, which was all that was required, he replied with pride and hauteur. He declared that his sexual habits were his own concern and he said that he refused to recognize the right of anyone to question him about his private life. The head of the department liked Francis very much and he did not care very much what Francis’ habits were, for he was an excellent teacher. But he felt that the refusal to make the conventional denial suggested the likelihood of future difficulty, and being concerned about his own position, he felt he had no choice but to dismiss Francis. He tried again to suggest to Francis that a nominal denial would be sufficient, but Francis would not be moved. His stand gave him the pleasure of being self-righteous. For long he had felt strongly that homosexuality was the real right thing, the noble and aristocratic thing, a view he supported by citing the great authors and artists who had been as he was.

To Jacob, looking back, Francis seemed to have been involved in a failure of the imagination. He had been unable to imagine the feelings of the head of the department which were complex and yet also convenient enough. This failure was important because in so many ways Francis had devoted his will to making himself impressive to other human beings.

Now Jacob bore in mind how Rudyard had applauded Francis’ stand, although it had cost Francis the status in life he desired so much. Rudyard had declared that no other answer was possible without an absolute loss of self-respect. Yet had Rudyard been confronted with the same choice, Jacob was sure that he would not have hesitated in making the answer which was convenient and profitable. Whether Rudyard knew this to be true of himself or not, he too was involved in the same loss of imagination, for he did not recognize how much Francis had hurt himself. “No one fools anyone much, except himself,” said Jacob to himself. “How do I fool myself?”

Francis had soon become a teacher in the public school system, and devoted himself with energy and concentration to his sexual life. For five days each week he taught from nine until three and then from four until midnight his obsession with sexual pleasure took hold of him and in time preoccupied him so much that all the other things which had interested him were forgotten. The drudgery of teaching in a high school was the basis of the intense system with which he dealt with actuality, performing his duties as a teacher with thoroughness because this made him feel secure and full of control when he let himself go after school.

He let himself go more and more. He came less frequently to the Saturday evenings of the circle, and when he did come, he conferred most often with Rudyard, discussing his adventures and conquests. He told Marcus Gross, who was boisterous and ebullient about his own orthodox desires, that no one knew what sexual pleasure was until he became homosexual. He said also that everyone was really homosexual. Only fear, ignorance, foolishness, and shame kept all human beings from being aware of true passion and satisfaction.

Yet Jacob wondered if Francis did not permit himself passages of intellectual doubt. His sexual preoccupation had become not only a fixed idea which annihilated all other ideas, as one addicted to opium withdraws more and more from all other things; it had become a kind of sunlight: Francis had at first regarded all things in that light and he had come at last to see only the sunlight and nothing else.

“Perhaps one ought not to praise love too much,” Jacob said to himself, “what will become of Francis in ten years or when he is middle-aged? He will have no wife, no house and no child. He has made an absolute surrender to one thing and in the end he may have nothing.”

Jacob arose from the park bench and began to walk through the park, paying attention only to the movements of his mind.

“On the other hand,” he said to himself, “I can’t say for certain that anyone else has or will have more than Francis who at least has what he wants most of all.”

He thought of Marcus Gross, who like Francis taught in a public high school, but was otherwise unlike him. Marcus was the scapegoat and butt of the circle, a part which he often seemed to enjoy. He was extremely serious about everything, even the prepared jokes by means of which he attempted to show his sense of humor, and he was protected by an impenetrable insensitivity from the epithets and the insults directed at him. In fact, he rejoiced in the insulting remarks made about him and to him, for he felt that such attention showed him as an interesting and rich character. Thus when the story of his visit to a house of prostitution was discussed in his presence, after he had been betrayed by the boy who had taken him, when the very choreography of his visit, his awkwardness, his disrobing, his gestures of affection were enacted before him, he was delighted. And he laughed as at another human being when the comedians came to the moment when the girl was said to have said to Marcus: “You like it buck naked, big boy?” When this quotation was reached, Marcus laughed more loudly than anyone else.

Attacked with a cruelty untouched by pity or compunction, Marcus often provided unbearable provocation. Often in the unpleasant, sodden New York summer, he entered the Bell household and went straight to the bathroom without greeting or explanation, bathed and returned in his bare feet to the living room, unable to understand why his behavior was regarded as boorish and self-absorbed. He was disturbed and hurt only when he was not kept acquainted with all that had occurred in the life of the circle, or when Rudyard attacked him, and even then he was often able to defend himself by answering Rudyard in ways which he regarded as hilarious. When Rudyard looked merely perplexed, Marcus only repeated what he had said, adding: “The trouble with you is that you have no sense of humor!” To the astonishment of all, he was offended at unexpected times, for no principle or consistent region of sensitivity could be discerned in his hurt feelings. Yet when Marcus stalked from the house at a remark which was no different from many at which he had smiled complacently, and when he did not return for weeks, an effort was made to discover what had offended him. When he returned, he behaved as if he had not been absent, he took part in the conversation as if he had been present all the while, and when Rudyard, annoyed, said to him: “How do you know?” moved by Marcus’ authoritative participation in the discussion, Marcus replied briefly: “I heard,” for he refused no matter what effort was made, to discuss his absences.

Unlike as were Francis and Marcus (they were extremes, the one courtly, the other uncouth) they were also very different from Edmund Kish and Ferdinand Harrap.

“And what about myself?”Jacob asked himself. “And Rudyard and Laura?”

Edmund had for four years been a student of philosophy, waiting to be asked to be a teacher. There were not many jobs to be had, but when there was one, some other student, not Edmund, was given the job. Yet Edmund was clearly superior to the others. The professors, the higher powers who possessed all the favors, at first had been enchanted with Edmund. He was energetic, original and impressive. He was learned and in love with his subject. But he loved to argue and argument excited him always until he betrayed his assumption that the other human being was a fool.

“Yet he does not think that everyone else is a fool,” thought Jacob. “Not at all: he only thinks that he is smarter. Then why does he act like that? Perhaps he is trying to prove to himself that he is smart, perhaps he is never sure of that.”

Triumphant in his arguments with other students, Edmund sought to be full of deference when he spoke with his teachers, especially after he had been passed by for years. But as soon as a qualification or reservation was suggested, Edmund forgot the politeness he had promised himself. He rehearsed to his teachers the ABC’s of the subject and raised objections, which clearly implied that the teacher knew nothing whatever.

His teachers in the end feared and disliked him, and although they were unable to condemn him directly, they spoke of him in letters of recommendation as “a gifted but difficult person.” This satisfied them that they were just and was sufficient to keep him from getting any job he wanted.

“What is it?” Jacob asked himself. “Is it something in the darkness of the family life from which we have all emerged which compels Edmund to assert himself like that? Is it his two brothers, his father’s tyranny, or his mother’s unequal affections? That’s just one more thing we don’t know.”

Jacob paused to have a modest lunch. And the choice of food made him think of Ferdinand Harrap.

As Rudyard sought to be a dramatist, Ferdinand had tried to write stories. He did not lack the gift of experience, as did Rudyard, who found in all circumstances only a backdrop before which to manifest what he already possessed, his charm, his wit, and his delight in himself. Ferdinand was reserved. He held himself back and he was very much interested in whatever was before him. His stories, however, belonged to a small province, the province of his own life with his mother and his mother’s family. The essential motive of his stories was the disdain and superiority he felt about these human beings of the older generation, and his stories always concerned the contemptuous exchanges of the characters, the witty quarrels which revealed the cruelty and the ignorance of their relationship to each other.

“You have to love human beings,” thought Jacob, “if you want to write stories about them. Or at least you have to want to love them. Or at least you have to imagine the possibility that you might be able to love them. Maybe that’s not true. But it is true that Ferdinand detests everyone but his friends of the circle.”

None of Ferdinand’s stories were published. Unlike Rudyard, he did not persevere, lacking Rudyard’s joy in the process of composition and Rudyard’s belief in himself. For a time he did nothing at all, and then, in helping one of his uncles, Ferdinand perceived the need of an agency which would arrange matters between manufacturers and retail stores. This perception of the usefulness of such an agency required an acute but peculiar intelligence, an intelligence like a squint. Ferdinand was not concerned about becoming rich, as business men were, and thus in helping his uncle, his indifference and his sense of superiority soon made obvious to him what no one else saw. Soon, with a small office and a girl to handle the mail, Ferdinand was making five thousand dollars a year, and had only to go to the office briefly each day to see that the girl was handling matters properly.

As soon as he prospered, Ferdinand’s sense of what was good taste became active. His manners became more stiff and more pointed, and he dressed like a dandy, but strangely, as if he were a dandy of the past. And when he had money to spend, his feeling that he must have the best of everything, or nothing, had to be satisfied. He had to have the best orchestra seats at the theatre and he had to have the best dinner at the best restaurants.

“An only child,” said Jacob to himself, “and the child of a mother divorced from her husband since he was four years of age.”

The best of anything was truly a necessity to Ferdinand and he suffered very much when he was deprived of it. He insisted also that his friends of the circle join with him, accepting his criterion. This was difficult because they had little money or no money at all. Often Ferdinand paid for them, and he always paid for Rudyard, whom he admired very much. But when he did not care to pay for one of the boys, at dinner or at the theatre, and when they suggested that they come at less expense, Ferdinand strictly forbade their coming. He refused to go or he went by himself to the best restaurant and sat in the best seat at the Broadway play. When he was asked by a stranger the reason for his concentration upon dining well, Ferdinand replied in the curt and stern tone he so often used that dinner was extremely important: if one dined well, one felt good; otherwise, one did not.

A severe, private, hardly understood code ruled Ferdinand in all things. He regarded certain acts as good behavior and everything else, every difference, change, or departure as infamous and to be denounced. It was often necessary to prevent Ferdinand from making remarks of virtually insane cruelty to newcomers and strangers who visited the circle, for if they behaved in a way of which he disapproved or in a way indifferent to what he regarded as proper, he was likely to tell them that they were unpardonable fools. Visitors and strangers did not know what it was impossible for them to know, the strict and personal standard by which Ferdinand judged all acts and all remarks. Fortunately Ferdinand’s constraint and stiffness made him speak in a very low voice, so that often enough the most extraordinary insult was left unheard. It was then necessary for Rudyard or Jacob to translate the sentence of final condemnation into a mild euphemism. When Ferdinand said to a stranger: “You must be out of your mind!” Rudyard explained that Ferdinand disagreed with what the stranger had just said, while Ferdinand turned aside, indifferent to the reduction of his insult and feeling that he had made his stand.

Jacob had arrived at Riverside Drive. He looked down on the Hudson River and, feeling the overwhelming presence of the great city, he thought of his friends as citizens of the city and of the city itself in which they lived and were lost.

“In New York,” he said to himself, often concluding his slow tours with such monologues, “there are nineteen thousand horses, three hundred thousand dogs, five hundred thousand cats, one million trees and one million sparrows: more than enough!

“On the other hand, there are at least six million human beings and during holidays there are more than that number. But, in a way, these numbers hardly exist because they cannot be perceived (we all have four or five friends, more or less). No human being can take in such an aggregation: all that we know is that there is always more and more. This is the moreness of which we are aware, no matter what we look upon. This moreness is the true being of the great city, so that, in a way, this city hardly exists. It certainly does not exist as does our family, our friends, and our neighborhood.”

Jacob felt that he had come to a conclusion which showed the shadow in which his friends and he lived. They did not inhabit a true community and there was an estrangement between each human being and his family, or between his family and his friends, or between his family and his school. Worst of all was the estrangement in the fact that the city as such had no true need of any of them, a fact which became more and more clear during the great depression.

“Yet,” thought Jacob, seeking to see the whole truth, “there is the other side, which always exists. They say of New York that it is like an apartment hotel. And they say: ‘It’s fine for a visit, but I would not want to live here.’ They are wrong. It’s fine to live here, but exhausting on a visit.

“Once New York was the small handsome self-contained city of the merchant prince and the Dutch patroon’s great grandsons. And once it was the brownstone city ruled by the victors of the Civil War. Then the millions drawn or driven from Europe transformed the city, making the brownstone mansions defeated rooming houses. Now, in the years of the great depression, it is for each one what he wants it to be, if he has the money. If he has the money! Coal from Pennsylvania, oranges from California, tea from China, films from Hollywood, musicians and doctors of every school! Every kind of motion, bus and car, train and plane, concerto and ballet! And if the luxuries of the sun and the sea are absent, if life in this city seems brittle as glass, every kind of vehicle here performs every kind of motion to take the citizen away from the city, if he has the money! The city in its very nature contains all of the means of departure as well as return. Thus the city gives to the citizen a freedom from itself, and thus one might say that this is the capital of departure. But none of my friends will go away: they are bound to each other. They have too great a need of each other, and all are a part of the being of each.”

Jacob Cohen was through for the day. He had said to himself all that he wanted to say. Thus he had conversed with himself during the years that he had dedicated himself to being the kind of a citizen that he thought he ought to be. And if he seldom uttered these thoughts to anyone, nevertheless their feeling was contained and vivid in all that other human being saw of him. This was the reason that he seemed to some, strange; to some, preoccupied; to some, possessed by secrecy and silence.

FOUR: “TEARS FOR THE HUMAN BEINGS WHO HAVE NOTHING TO SAY TO EACH OTHER”

Jacob Cohen for long had been the conscience and the noble critic of the circle. No one knew precisely how this had come about. In school, as editor of the university daily, the students too had felt an incomparable devotion and loyalty to him. It was said that they would do anything for him. And in his family, when he refused to become part of the family business, his father and his brothers were not distressed. They did not think that he was wasting his time when, except for his tours of the neighborhood and the city, he did nothing at all, although in all other families there was concern and anger when the young man appeared to be making no effort to earn a living and to get ahead. It was felt that what Jacob did was right, no matter what he did. No one was surprised when Jacob refused to be a reporter on a Hearst newspaper because he felt that the Hearst newspapers were in sympathy with Fascism. No one was surprised although to be a reporter was Jacob’s dear vocation because of which he refused to be anything else.

So too in the circle itself, Jacob’s moral preeminence was absolute, although no one in the least understood it. Jacob’s judgment, approval or disapproval were accepted as just. It was felt spontaneously that his judgment flowed from principles independent of personal desire or distortion. It is true that all knew a hardly conscious desire that such a person as Jacob should exist, but this did not explain their spontaneous recognition of him as that person.

No one but Jacob knew how much hopelessness and despair he felt at times, emotions bottomless and overpowering which made him lose all interest or power to be interested in anything outside of himself. Jacob did not understand these emotions which persisted for months and made him withdraw from others. Yet these emotions made possible Jacob’s noble indifference, an important part of his moral authority.

It was natural that Rudyard and Laura should turn in the end to Jacob for his opinion about an argument which they had disputed for weeks. This argument concerned Rudyard’s habit of reading the newspaper at the dinner table when no one was present but Laura.

“You ought to talk to me,” said Laura, and there were periods when Rudyard enjoyed conversation with Laura. But often he wanted to read and he did not want to converse when he ate the dinner Laura had prepared when she returned from work. To Laura this seemed an unnecessary affront precisely because she had returned to make his dinner.

“First of all,” said Rudyard, to defend his reading, “when I read at dinner it is a manifestation of the truly human. You know very well that if I were an animal, I would take my food somewhere and eat it alone. I would eat it very fast and I would be afraid that some other animal might take it away from me. But since I am a human being and since I have a head,” he touched his head as he said this, “eating does not satisfy the whole of my being and it is necessary for me to read.”

“How about conversation?” said Laura, disgruntled and knowing that she had no hope of persuading Rudyard since she never persuaded him of anything. “I suppose conversation is not a purely human activity?”

“It is, it is!” Rudyard replied. “But reading is superior to it, in general, as authors are superior to other human beings. And as for me, my being is such that to satisfy the rational part of it, I must regard the great works of thought and literature.”

“Half the time you just read the newspaper,” said Laura.

“Yes,” said Rudyard serenely, “but not as others do, for I read the newspaper to rejoin the popular life of this city.”

These grandiose answers, which Rudyard delivered in a tone at once superior and coy, angered Laura, but at the same time impressed her and made her remember that she had long since decided that Rudyard was a genius.

Arriving at the Bell household just after dinner, Jacob was asked his opinion.

“If a brother and sister don’t have a great deal to say to each other,” answered Jacob, “who does? We might as well be deaf and dumb! As a matter of fact, I’d say that we might as well be dead. Conversation is civilization.”

Rudyard bowed to Jacob’s judgment in general, making an exception of himself in that his sister was not as all sisters should be. But he did not say this for he was much interested in the idea of the truly human at the moment. As the other boys arrived at the apartment, he took them aside and explained it to them, and they too took pleasure in it, as well as being flattered by the appearance of intimacy which Rudyard conferred upon each of them when he took each one aside.

This discussion, which Rudyard conducted in a comic manner since he did not like to be serious about any ideas, much as ideas were dear to him, was halted when Edmund Kish entered with exciting news about the fate of the marriage of B. L. Rosen and Priscilla Gould.

“They have been seen for two weeks at dinner in the same restaurant,” said Edmund breathlessly.

This far-off marriage had first astonished and then fascinated the circle. Some of the boys had been acquainted with B. L. Rosen at school, and they had been contemptuous of the way in which he had continued to be a leader of student political movements long after graduation.

“He wants to be an official youth,” Edmund had remarked.

“He wants to be a permanent youth,” Rudyard had added.

B. L., as all who knew him called him, feeling the nascent executive in him, had become in the end the head of all the radical student movements in all the city universities. He spoke for youth and for students. No one, however, knew of Priscilla Gould until her father, a successful Broadway playwright, wrote an article in one of the national weeklies in which he said that his daughter had been taught to believe in Communism, atheism and free love by her teachers at the university. It was B. L.’s task to see Priscilla and to persuade her to defend the university and her teachers. B. L. had succeeded very well. Priscilla had been bewildered and enchanted by the attention she suddenly received. The truth was that she had been a shy and withdrawn student and she had joined the radical student society as a way of being part of the school life, for she was afraid that she would never be anything but a wallflower. B. L. persuaded Priscilla to write an answer to her father in which she said: “My father is dishonest,” a kind of choral sentence uttered repetitively throughout the detailed exposition of her father’s other shortcomings as a father, such as that he had never given her the attention a child required.

This answer was an overwhelming success and B. L. was credited with a stroke of political genius. But as B. L. had helped Priscilla to write her answer, he had made love to her, almost as if from habit, for he had always absentmindedly courted some girl during his career as a student leader. When Priscilla shyly proposed to him that they get married, B. L. was much too amazed to ask for time to think about such a marriage. His prudence and circumspection had for long been concentrated on matters which were impersonal if not international. His manners and his essential kindness were such that he felt that he had to answer Priscilla immediately. When he saw the fearful and pathetic look upon Priscilla’s face, he had assented immediately, telling himself that she might be as good as anyone else and perhaps better. Moreover, if he were married he might have more time for the concerns which truly interested him.

The news of the marriage was first received by the circle as a thunderbolt, but soon it awakened as much passionate interpretation as any other episode of these years.

It was suggested that some pathological feeling had compelled B. L. to marry Priscilla, either sexual feeling for his own sex, or a desire to possess an utterly passive wife. Francis French suggested that Priscilla might resemble B. L.’s mother when he was an infant at the breast. Rudyard thought it far more likely that Priscilla was seeking to escape from an incestuous desire for her father, since B. L. was truly as far away from her father as she could get. Rudyard also dismissed as banal, trite, obvious and hence untrue the view that B. L. might have married Priscilla because he wished to ascend in the social scale. Edmund, on the other hand, declared that whatever motives might have inspired the newly-wedded couple, the marriage was in actual fact an attack on the ruling class. It was somewhat far-fetched to suppose that Priscilla belonged to the ruling class, but the match had an unequivocal symbolic meaning: it was the beginning of the disappearance of the Anglo-Saxon. Ferdinand regarded the union as a striking example of the degradation which overtook all who were interested in social problems and in politics. The underlying reason for all these speculations was that marriage for all of the circle was far-off, and when Laura said: “Maybe she just likes him and he just likes her,” she was regarded as superficial.

Edmund’s exciting news about the distant marriage was that B. L. and Priscilla had been seen at dinner for two weeks in the same Italian restaurant, and on each night the husband and the wife had been reading two copies of the same newspaper, saying nothing to each other from start to finish.

“It’s too good to be true,” said Edmund joyously, “after all, they have only been married for six months. But probably they no longer can imagine a period when they were not married.”

“Here we see,” said Rudyard, declamatory, “in this reading of the same newspaper, a noble effort on the part of a wife to share her husband’s intellectual interests!”

“This behavior,” said Ferdinand, “is of a matchless vulgarity!”

“If we had any sense,” said Jacob, “we would burst into tears for all the husbands and wives who have nothing to say to each other.”

“How many months,” said the delighted Edmund, “have passed since last they exchanged the time of the day?”

“How about you,” said Laura to Rudyard, “don’t you read the newspaper at the dinner table?”

“It’s not the same thing,” said Rudyard, “I did not marry you.”

The insensitivity of this remark would not have passed unnoticed, had not Francis French entered on one of his rare visits. He too had a story in which he was very much interested. He had encountered during the previous week-end a youthful teacher and critic, Mortimer London, who was reputed to be brilliant.

“I have long believed,” said Francis, “that everyone himself tells the worst stories about himself. London told me (keep in mind that fact that London himself tells this story about himself) that when he was in England last year, he had paid a visit to T. S. Eliot who had given him a letter of introduction to James Joyce, since he was going to Paris also. Now London says that he was confronted with a cruel choice, whether to use the letter and converse with the author of Ulysses or to keep the letter in which a great author commends him to a great author. He decided to keep the letter!”

“What a dumb-bell,” said Edmund, the veteran scholar, “he should have known that the choice might be forestalled. He might have made a photostat copy!”

“Never mind that,” said Rudyard, who did not like to be concerned with practical considerations, “what’s really interesting is the extent to which this Mortimer London is insane. For obviously he tells this story because of great pride in himself. He does not know that there is nothing worse that he can say about himself: he would rather possess the letter than converse with the great author.”

“Never mind,” said Laura to Rudyard, “I never saw you hiding your light in a dark closet.”

Rudyard did not reply, fascinated by this example of egotism as only an egotist can be.

“I wonder,” said Jacob, “what are the worst stories each of us tells against himself.”

“Once in a while,” said Laura, “just for a change, we ought to try saying something good about anyone. Anyone can run down anyone else, it is as easy as sliding off a chute. What’s hard is to love other human beings and to speak well of them.”

“You are being sententious,” said Rudyard, “it is obviously true that human beings are more evil than good, and thus it would be false to speak well of other human beings very much, although I am willing to try anything once,” concluding as often with an irony which, directed against himself, defended him against what anyone else might say.

“The fact is” said Jacob, as the visitor arose to depart, “I can’t think of what the worst story I tell against myself is, and that is nothing, if not alarming. We are all living in a world of our own.”

“Yes,” said Rudyard, chortling because the idea delighted him, “in a certain sense, we are all cracked!”

FIVE: “IT IS GOOD TO BE THE WAY THAT WE ARE”

During the day, after he had labored at his new play in the morning in the glow of after-breakfast, Rudyard participated in a life apart from the circle, a life in which a different part of his being showed itself. This life was concerned with the children and the adolescents of the neighborhood, and it was an intrusion, which annoyed Rudyard, if he encountered an adult. If the adult, the parent of one of his friends, met Rudyard, he said with the politeness and interest of the middle class:

“What are you doing now?” meaning, how are you trying to make a living? How are you trying to get ahead?

“I am helping my father,” Rudyard always answered, having nurtured this answer until it was automatic.

“What is your father doing?” the helpless adult often inquired, never having heard of Rudyard’s father because he had been dead for twenty years.

“My father is doing nothing!” was Rudyard’s stock answer, followed by harsh and triumphant laughter that the questioner had walked into the trap, although in all truth Rudyard was ashamed that he had nothing impressive to announce.

Among the children and the adolescents of the neighborhood Rudyard was at his best, however. In the schoolyard near the apartment house, between bouts of handball, Rudyard conversed in the fall and in the spring with those who were to him the pure in heart and the wise just as he seemed to himself to be to them one of the wise and the pure in heart.

As he sat upon the asphalt court, after a game of doubles, he discussed with his friends Chester and Jeremiah, the star of the school, a boy named Alexander, twelve years of age, who was best in handball, basketball, high jumping, and the hundred yard dash. It was felt by all that Alexander had a great future.

“Suppose,” said Rudyard to his friends, “Alexander was at least a hundred times better than he is. Then he would win all the time in all the games. But if he was as good as that, if he won all the time, if every contest was a victory, if he was sure of winning every game, then he would not enjoy the game very much.”

Chester suggested that Alexander might then join the New York Yankees and earn a fabulous salary, more than the President’s. Jeremiah added that his picture might appear in all the newspapers and he might marry a moving picture actress.

“Yes,” said Rudyard patiently, brushing aside these ideas of the glory of this world, “suppose he hit a homer every time he came to bat? Suppose he was sure of hitting a homer? Don’t you think he would get bored with playing baseball?”

“Yes,” answered Chester and Jeremiah, “but he can’t and he won’t.”

Rudyard was not in the least concerned or disturbed by any pointing to an actual fact.

“This is how we can see,” he continued, “that it is good to be the way that we are. It would be no good, if we were unable to play any games at all. But just because we don’t know if we are going to win or lose, just because our powers are limited and the other boys have powers not unlike our own, the game is exciting to play. So you can see that we are all what we ought to be.”

“Just the same,” said Chester, “I would like to hit a homer every time I came to bat.”

“Me too,” said Jeremiah, “for a year, anyway.”

From such interviews Rudyard returned refreshed to his dramatic works. The volley of the conversation, as at a tennis match, was all that he took with him. For what he wanted and what satisfied him was the activity of his own mind. This need and satisfaction kept him from becoming truly interested in other human beings, although he sought them out all the time. He was like a travelling virtuoso who performs brilliant set-pieces and departs before coming to know his listeners.

An old teacher, meeting Rudyard after not seeing him for years, said to him that he showed no little courage in continuing to write works which gained for him neither fame nor money nor production.

“O, no,” said Rudyard, “it requires no courage whatever. I write when I feel inspired. When I don’t feel like writing, I don’t. Thus I am not like other authors. It is not a career, it is like playing a game, and it is not courage, but inspiration, a very different emotion.”

This reply was made in the style which Rudyard felt to be noble and necessary. But after this exchange, Rudyard asked himself if he had spoken truly. He knew very well a passion in himself to be applauded and to be famous, the same as other authors. Triumphant and delighted with himself, Rudyard decided that he did not want to be regarded as a playwright, he truly desired and enjoyed the activity of writing plays. This activity was enough to satisfy him.

The question and the answer inspired Rudyard to write a play in one act which resembled many of his previous dramas. This play contained only one character, a famous lyric poet, and only one scene, his study, in which he is surrounded by books, photographs, objects of art, and the black souvenir album in which are fixed essays and reviews of his poems which testify to his fame. The shades have been drawn down to bar the light of the living street.

The famous poet holds his head in his hands as he sits at his desk. In a monologue full of blank despair, he speaks of the fact that he has been unable to write a poem for two years.

“What difference does it make if I write a poem or I do not write a poem?” he says.

He holds in his hand a volume of his poems and he says:

“If I have done something worth doing, what good does it do me now? What good if I have drawn from the depths of my mind a good poem, if I do not enjoy now the sense of accomplishment and fruitfulness. One might as well tell a singer who has lost his voice that he was incomparable in all the great parts or equally tell a starving man that he was at a banquet two months before.”

He reads aloud passages by critics in which he is awarded the highest praise:

“How can I be sure that they are right?” he says. “Many have been wrong. No poet is ever sure that he has written an important work. The famous in their lifetime are forgotten and nonentities long since in the grave appear as the true poets.”

“And if this praise is true,” he says, after he reads a new passage of praise from the album, “it does not lessen in the least the pain, the boredom and the emptiness which weigh me down now. If it is untrue, I have been deceived like a drunkard by passing imagination?”

He arises and stands before his long looking-glass:

“I might have acquired a great deal of money. I might have tasted the pleasures of the rich or the satisfactions of the normal. I might have enjoyed myself like a child at the seashore, near the breaking waves all through the glittering day. Instead I have grown warped, narrow and weak in this room at this table.”

With his hand, he presses back his brow, looking closely at himself.

“I am too old to turn back and too young to forget my brilliant hopes. I am too intelligent to be uncritical of my fame, and the present is too important to me for me to be at peace because of the laurels I have gained in the past. Praise is worthless, but since praise is worthless, now that I cannot compose new works, I see for the first time, as if this were the first morning of my life, that there is only one reason to write poems: the only reason to write poems is for the sake of the activity of the whole being which one enjoys when one writes poems. This is the only justification.”

He seats himself at his desk again, and he says:

“The silence surrounds me like four o’clock in the morning.”

He draws forth a sheet of paper and takes a pencil from a cup.

“The silence of the white paper is my everlasting place. There is nothing else for me. Everything else is for the sake of this activity. When I cannot write a poem, when I have nothing in my mind but emptiness, then nothing else is good. When, on the other hand, a blazing excitement leaps in my mind, then I do not have happiness, for then all labor, all hope, all illusion are once more loaded on my back, as I sit here in my solitude surrounded by the silence which is like the night before the creation of the world.”

And then, as the curtain falls, the famous poet begins to write upon his sheet of paper.

When this short play was read to the circle, it was received like many other recent plays by Rudyard. They had heard these ideas from Rudyard in conversation and were not much interested or impressed by the dramatic version.

Rudyard was distressed by this reception of his play, for he expected that the admiration of his friends would continue with equal intensity. For some time he had been annoyed with Edmund because Edmund, seeking to please him, would say:

“This new play does not seem to me as good as the first-rate plays you wrote last year.”

“It is the best piece I have ever written,” Rudyard had declared flatly, to vanquish his disappointment.

And when Rudyard had read aloud two plays and Edmund had said:

“I like the second more than the first,” Rudyard also became angry, perceiving the criticism in this judgment.

“Now you can see,” he said to Ferdinand, “the reason I have for reading two plays instead of just one. Then it can always be said that the first is better than the second. Perhaps I ought to read three plays each time. Then it will be possible to say, I like the first better than the second, but I like the third better than the first. Meanwhile I have made it possible to refuse to answer the question of whether any of them are any good! To what infinite limits I go for the sake of making my friends full of tact.”

But when Edmund said of this new play that it was perhaps the best Rudyard had written, Rudyard was disturbed by this praise also, for it seemed to him to suggest a condemnation of his previous works. It was at this moment of annoyed disappointment, that Marcus Gross entered loudly.

“As for your plays,” he said to Rudyard, “what have they to do with anything else? No wonder they are not produced. If you were any good, you would be successful.”

“You are just a Philistine,” Rudyard replied in fury. “Minute by minute, you become more stupid. You can’t tell an idea from a hole in the ground!”

“Your feelings are hurt,” said Marcus with solemn calm, as if he had made a discovery.

“You did not hear this play from the beginning…” Lloyd Tyler began to say.

“It’s not necessary,” said Marcus, interrupting him, “they are all alike.”

“In all the evenings I have been here,” said Lloyd because he had been interrupted, “I have yet to succeed in uttering a complete sentence.”

Ferdinand was delighted with this remark. “Do you know what Lloyd just said?” he asked loudly and then quoted Lloyd’s remark which seemed to all but Lloyd to be a remark of extraordinary brilliance.

“I have not uttered a complete sentence since 1928,” shouted Laura from the kitchen where she was drinking. This declaration caused an immediate uproar.

“Has Laura been drinking again?” Marcus inquired. And when she began to set the table, he regarded her carefully.

“Why don’t you get married?” he said to her. “It might do you a lot of good.”

Edmund told Marcus to shut up and stop being such a boob, and when the evening was over, Marcus, still astonished by being reproved, asked Edmund what he had done that was wrong and how he had offended Laura. When at last he understood, he said to Edmund pensively: “Do you know, I never thought of that. It never occurred to me.”

SIX: “LOVE THE DARK VICTOR WHOM NO ONE OUTWITS”

Edmund thought he had made a most important discovery.

Bringing it with him to the Bell household on a Saturday evening, he was hardly able to wait for everyone’s attention. And he would not speak until everyone was ready to listen to him.

“A revolution has occurred,” said Edmund, “but it is subject to silence, since love is subject to shame. Love has been purified, as never before. Love has been made to be just love and and nothing else but love.”

“How?” asked Rudyard.

“By the druggist,” said Edmund, “by the sale of contraceptives.”

Rudyard and Ferdinand exchanged looks which each understood very well. Was it possible, they said by looking at each other, that Edmund, the withdrawn scholar, had at long last suffered the loss of his innocence, an actual innocence, which existed with complete knowledge?

“The contraceptive,” Edmund continued, “has purified love by freeing it from the accident of children. Now everyone with any sense can find out whom he truly loves. Children can be chosen beings, and not the result of impetuous lust or impatient appetite. Now love is love and nothing else but love!”

“Yes,” said Rudyard, “a mere material device has utterly transformed the relationships between men and women: a mere material thing!”

“On the other hand,” said Francis French, “it also makes possible adultery, and promiscuity, not that I have anything against promiscuity.”

“I love my wife, but oh you id,” said Ferdinand, who had studied Freud and Tin Pan Alley.

“Yes,” said Jacob, “it makes everything too easy, which is always a good reason for suspicion and doubt. Love is more difficult than anything else. Love is the dark victor whom no one outwits.”

“Exactly,” said Edmund, “this device, so small and inexpensive, assures the victory of love. Love cannot be prevented, love cannot be set aside, no thoughts of utility or shame can intervene.”

“There is nothing in it,” said Laura, “you still have to find someone to love who loves you.”

Jacob, somewhat apart, saw that on this subject opinion was absolute and speculation infinite precisely because they were so far from the actuality of love.

“How far is it to love?” he said to himself. “Love the dark victor whom no one escapes.”

Edmund felt that this balloon of an idea, of which he had expected so much, had collapsed. Rudyard, who expected a visitor he had never seen before, was preoccupied, Jacob was withdrawn, Laura was sad, Ferdinand was attempting to produce a new witticism. Yet Edmund felt that he must try again.

“The Pope in Rome,” said Edmund, “ought to be told of this. Yes, I will write him an epistle. Does he not know that God looked at Adam, in Eden, and remarked: ‘It is not good for man to be alone.’ By banning the use of the pure and purifying contraceptive, the Pope misunderstands the word of God which says that the reason for marriage is that man should have children. For it is not necessary to have marriage in order to have children, but if we are not to be alone, marriage alone is sufficient.”

Rudyard and Ferdinand again exchanged glances of wonder concerned with Edmund’s private life, what was new in it.

Marcus, ever late, entered loudly and demanded to know what was being discussed.

“It is not easy to say,” said Jacob, “but on the surface, at least, it is an academic discussion of love.”

“Speaking of love,” said Marcus, who had need only of a slight pretext to brim over with his own thoughts, “I read a fine story today about Flaubert—”

“The promising French novelist, no doubt,” asked Ferdinand.

“Flaubert,” said Marcus, ignoring Ferdinand, “made a bet with two of his friends that he would be able to make love, smoke a cigar, and write a letter at the same time. They went to a house of prostitution and found the best girl, and Flaubert wrote the letter, smoked the cigar, and made love to the girl.”

“What he really enjoyed,” said Rudyard, “was the cigar.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Marcus, “what I want to know is, What did he say in the letter? And to whom was it written? And what was the tone? and what kind of cigar was it? and did he have time to finish it?”

“Speaking of letters,” said Rudyard, who felt that this topic was exhausted, “I am being visited tonight, by a stranger who wrote me a letter.”

The letter was from a true stranger, a being from a foreign country, Archer Price, a young man of thirty who directed a little theatre in San Francisco. He had seen two of Rudyard’s plays in manuscript, and now that he had come to New York, he wanted to meet Rudyard.

Rudyard was delighted by his letter, but nevertheless made fun of it.

“How can human beings of the Far West understand my play?” he asked. “Their idea of drama is the thrilling final match of a tennis tournament.”

Yet Rudyard looked forward very much to the visit of the stranger.

Archer Price arrived at the Bell household with Pauline Taylor, a pretty young woman who lived in New York City, but had come to know Archer during a visit to California. When the strangers entered the house, the discussion of love stopped. In the midst of the introductions, as all were standing up, Archer, who was seldom at ease, said to Rudyard what he had decided to say before he arrived.

“I am very glad to meet you,” said Archer, “because I admire your plays very much.”

“What a remark!” said Rudyard, who appeared to be astounded by it and who looked to Edmund, as if to see if he too did not suppose this sentence to be outlandish.

“Says he admires two of my plays very much,” said Rudyard to Edmund, and then pouted and placed one finger under his chin, as if he were about to curtsey.

“I really admire your plays very much,” said Archer, bewildered and offended.

“I know you do,” said Rudyard, as if this repetition were unnecessary, “otherwise you would not be here.”

Archer seated himself on the studio couch and glanced at Pauline to see what her impression was. She glanced back in sympathy, for she was concerned not with Rudyard, but with Archer, and she knew how distressed he was by Rudyard’s way of responding to his utterance of admiration. Neither of the newcomers knew that Rudyard’s behavior had been inspired by his extreme pleasure, for he had so long desired the admiration of strangers that his self-possession teetered and he tried to regain his balance by regarding this admiration as peculiar. Both newcomers understood such emotions and attitudes very well, but they did not recognize Rudyard’s version, because it was extreme, private, and directed not at the visitors, but at Edmund and Laura.

“What an obnoxious human being,” thought Pauline Taylor.

Archer remained curious and open to persuasion. He regarded the apartment and saw that the furniture was worn and second-hand, making a picture of the second-hand and the used cultivated as an interesting background and decor. Against the wall stood an upright piano, next to which was a phonograph, and upon the wall was a bulletin board, tacked with newspaper clippings and letters. Archer had never seen just such a place before, but although it seemed strange to him, he recognized in it the unity which comes of the choices and habits of one human being.

Rudyard seated himself next to Archer to converse with him and Archer remarked upon his surprise that none of Rudyard’s plays had ever been produced. Rudyard told him how each month for more than a year he had submitted a new play to a famous company and received each play back before a week had passed.

“I must be on the black list. They hardly have time to get the manuscript from the top manila envelope to the enclosed one, self-addressed and stamped!” said Rudyard, with a joyous look upon his face.

“Soon I will send them a letter of resignation,” he said vivaciously, looking up at the ceiling coyly, “that will puzzle them!”

Archer laughed in relief, for here at last was a remark which he was able to understand as comical.

Edmund and Marcus were full of a story which they wished to communicate immediately. During the week they had heard a debate at Madison Square Garden about religion and Communism. The opponents had been Professor Suss, a famous teacher of Marxist doctrine, and Professor Adam, a theologian. The chief dispute had been about the authority of a socialist state to dictate or deny the teaching of religion to children. Professor Suss had affirmed the right of the socialist state to decide about religious education and Professor Adam had said that this was a denial of freedom of thought and belief, and thus fascist, declaring triumphantly that he was ninety-nine and one-half per cent Marxist, but reserved one-half of one per cent for God, for if one did not reserve anything for God, then the state became the deity.

Rudyard and Edmund were delighted with this story and interested especially in the one-half of one per cent reserved for God.

“How did he decide just how much God deserves?” asked Edmund.

“Perhaps he used a slide rule?” said Rudyard. “Or perhaps he made deductions for dependents, as when one computes the income tax?”

This analysis and commentary continued until Rudyard became aware that no attention whatever was being paid to the visitors who remained silent on the studio couch, looking uncomfortable and perplexed. He arose and went to his room to get the manuscript of a new play for his visitors to read, and when he returned, he placed himself next to Archer again and looked over his shoulder, the while he also cocked an ear to the conversation which remained concerned with the fraction reserved for God by Professor Adam.

“This passage is superb!” Rudyard said suddenly, after Archer had read for some time, and as he spoke, he grinned like a child who has just been given candy.

“Here, in this scene,” said Rudyard, after a time, “the ignorance and irony is such that I am supreme among the dramatists who write in the English tongue.” And as he spoke, he looked as if he licked an ice cream cone.

“This has not been equalled during the present century,” Rudyard said again. Pauline was annoyed by these declarations, but to Archer they seemed to be made with such certainty, such a lack of self-consciousness, such joy and aplomb, that they were delightful. It was clear that Rudyard did not expect his listener to make any comment. He enjoyed uttering such sentences for their own sake. Yet Archer thought also of how such remarks would sound to anyone who heard them apart from Rudyard’s gestures, smiles, and look of self-assurance.

“You must take this play with you,” said Rudyard, drawing forth a new manuscript, “it is to me the best play in the English language!” And then he giggled.

“To you,” said Laura, “and to no one else.” She had seen the new look of perplexity on the visitors’ faces at this fabulous superlative.

Archer looked at his wrist-watch and arose.

“He lives by the clock,” said Rudyard, as if he spoke of one who was absent. “Perhaps I will never see you again,” he giggled.

“I don’t like Rudyard Bell,” said Pauline, as the two strangers departed from the house.

“He is certainly difficult,” said Archer, “perhaps it is because he is gifted and has gained no recognition.”

But when Archer Price returned to California, he decided that he would not attempt to visit Rudyard Bell when he next came to New York. He felt in the end distressed and perplexed by the visit. It seemed to him that the human beings of this circle existed in a private realm which did not permit the visiting stranger such as himself a true view of what they were and their life. He never saw them again.

SEVEN: “THIS KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS WITHIN YOU; BUT ALSO THE KINGDOM OF HELL”

“What we need is an Ark,” said Rudyard to one and all, “not an island, not a colony, and not a city state, but an Ark.”

Once again a play to which he had devoted much thought and hope had been rejected. Silent and angry in the morning, he was full of the future by afternoon, and by night — this was a Saturday night and most of the circle had come to the apartment — he had bounced back to the attitudes he enjoyed amid the circle. But anger and disappointment remained in him like sores and were transformed and expressed by the idea of an Ark.

“It’s an ancient and classic expression,” said Rudyard, “it’s about time that we thought of it. We will get a houseboat or a barge, announcing that this society is evil and we are going to depart.”

Ferdinand, ever close to Rudyard, was delighted.

“We will say, ‘We’re through!’ ” he added in a curt tone. “We will have an enormous poster in huge capitals and on it will be printed: ‘We have had enough.’ ‘We do not like this age.’” His voice became louder and stronger, “‘We find it beneath contempt!’”

“This is a governing and master idea,” said Edmund, equally pleased, “it is a conception so inclusive that by means of it we can make clear our judgment of the past and the future, of experience and possibility.”

It was almost midnight. They sat about the midnight supper, drinking more and more coffee, and the idea of the Ark took hold of them like the excitement before a holiday.

“What will we take with us?” Rudyard continued, “I mean to say, what and who will we permit to enter the Ark?”

“Precisely,” said Francis French, “discrimination is of the essence of this idea. There is no Ark unless we exercise the most pure, exact, and exacting discrimination.”

“This is far from a joke,” said Jacob, who had remained silent, although moved, “only an absolute fool would suppose that this is a laughing matter.”

“Who will be elected,” asked Francis, “to this elite?”

“And who will be rejected,” Marcus added, “we don’t want the riff-raff, the trash, the substitutes, the second-rate, the second best, and the second-hand.”

“The best is none too good for us,” said Rudyard, “I mean, for the Ark,” he smiled with mock humility.

“It is necessary to criticize and evaluate all things,” said Edmund.

“What else do you think you have been doing all these years?” said Laura, but she too was enthralled.

“Exactly, this is exactly what we have been doing,” Rudyard replied, “and this is the fulfillment which was inevitable.”

“And what makes you think,” said Laura, “that you’re the one to be the judge and the critic? You’re no Noah.”

“Just the fact,” answered Rudyard serenely, “that the conception of the Ark occurred to me. That such a conception should have been born among us shows that we are worthy of it. This is not true of any conception, but it is true of one so noble.”

“Maybe you’re just disgruntled,” said Laura in vain.

“Noah invented the gong,” said Edmund pensively, “and Noah was the first to make wine.”

“No wonder,” said Laura, “he needed a drink. Anyone would need a drink, after what he went through.”

“But for us,” said Rudyard, disregarding his sister, “it is not so much what we accept as what we reject that is important.”

“You can’t have everything,” said Jacob, “and you certainly can’t have too much.”

“We have had enough,” said Ferdinand, “and more than enough.”

“If you ask me,” said Laura, “none of you have what you want, and that’s what makes you mad.”

“Anger is the vice of gentlemen,” said Rudyard, “but the abounding strength of the truly noble. Let us begin with what we reject.” He took notebook and pencil in hand.

“We reject automobiles,” said Edmund, “I never liked them, anyway. Any boob thinks he is a king when he drives a car.”

“An automobile would be useless on a boat, anyway,” said Marcus.

“Too many human beings get killed in cars,” said Edmund. “A fine thing for a rational being: to die for an automobile!”

“And no more marriage,” said Rudyard. “Marriage is the chief cause of divorce and adultery. There are no marriages in heaven and if there are no marriages in heaven, why should we have them?”

“After all, there is something to be said for the family and family life,” said Jacob.

“We will have the family,” said Rudyard, “we will just not have any marriages.”

“How about the phonograph?” asked Jacob, already somewhat apart. “If you reject the automobile, then you can’t have the phonograph, and if we don’t have the phonograph, how will we be able to hear great music?”

“We don’t have to be consistent,” said Rudyard, “it is an overrated virtue used chiefly to defend the fearful from the beautiful possibilities with which their imaginations might become infatuated. We will reject the automobile and accept the phonograph.”

Apart from Jacob, it was felt that this was just, reasonable, and full of insight.

“How about the animals?” said Edmund. “Don’t forget that we have to have two of each kind, male and female.”

“Animals are fine,” said Francis, “I like animals. They are interesting, spontaneous, and sincere.”

“Animals and also children,” said Rudyard. “We will have a new education for them, the education of the Ark. They will not be taught the skills which crush their natures and prepare them to be desperate citizens of the middle class. We will teach them every kind of virtue and vice, and by this true education, they will be made truly free. For in what sense can a human being be said to be free, if he is not possessed by the knowledge of every possibility, famous and infamous?”

“You want the children to be just like you,” said Laura.

“I suppose you like the world as it is?” said Rudyard passionately. “Are you happy? Is anyone happy?”

Laura had no answer, but felt that Rudyard was wrong.

“As for me,” said Ferdinand, “I spit on this life.”

This declaration was acclaimed.

“This life,” added Ferdinand, “can go and take a flying La Rochefoucauld for itself.”

The addition was also acclaimed.

“Say what you will,” said Jacob, when the applause had ended, “there is something that must be said for this life. This idea of the Ark is only an idea, and yet we all hold back. There is no flood of rejections and renunciations. We are all too much in love with many things, whether we have them or not.”

“You don’t like Arks,” said Rudyard, knowing that a crisis had been reached, since Jacob was turning away.

“I like Arks well enough,” said Jacob, “although I have never been on one, and can’t be too sure. But I like many other things, even if they are not as good as they might be.”

“No,” said Rudyard, feeling that the emotion was slipping away and that the circle was becoming bored with the idea of the Ark.

“The kingdom of heaven is within us,” said Jacob, “but also the kingdom of hell.”

“What kingdom?” said Rudyard. “Do you know any kings? Do you know anyone who has found any kingdom within himself? I thought once that I had, but I was wrong.”

It was too late. Jacob smiled patiently and in sympathy.

“This is where we are,” said Jacob, “and this is where we are going to stay, waiting in hope and fear for what comes next in this life.”

“As for me, I am going home,” said Ferdinand, and all the visitors arose to depart, for they had had enough of the idea of the Ark.

EIGHT: “PRACTICALLY EVERYONE DOES WHAT HE WANTS TO DO IF HE CAN”

During a period when Rudyard was absent on a long visit, a celebrated cause and scandal broke out.

The scandal began with Marcus Gross. During the difficult winter of the year, he had paid much attention to a plump and pretty girl named Irene. She was active, efficient, interested in many things, especially radical politics. Marcus met her at meetings of the radical party to which both belonged, and he courted her not only because she was pretty, but also because he had already heard about her from a friend of his, Algernon Nathan. Algernon was a certain well-known type, the perfect student who gets the highest grades in all his classes. He was precise, thin-lipped, tormented by pride, and as humorless as a public monument. He earned a handsome salary and he felt unable to understand why he was not the perfect success in the great world that he had been in school. He had succeeded very quickly with Irene. His parents owned a store and it was simple for him to bring Irene home, either in the afternoon or in the early evening, when his parents were at the store. When his parents came home unexpectedly one day, Algernon left his bedroom, attired himself in his dressing gown, and halted his parents in the hallway, asking them to depart from the house because he was having sexual intercourse. The adoration, and awe of his parents were such that they left the house immediately and hurriedly, supposing that if Algernon, the perfect student, thought that this was right, it must indeed be right.

Algernon provided Marcus with a comprehensive description of his sessions with Irene, who was, he affirmed, “passionate to a satisfactory extent,” but with whom he did not like to be seen by his friends. Irene, however, wanted Algernon to take her out and to visit his friends with him. And Algernon found that what he really wanted from Irene, she did not really like. What he really wanted to do when he made love was to whip Irene. He had not gone so far as to propose this exercise to her, but had restricted himself to squeezing her and pinching her while he regarded the pain upon her face. This had been endured by Irene only upon occasion, when she was eager to please him. Her attitude was a blow to Algernon’s pride, for he felt that if a girl truly loved him, she ought to want whatever he wanted.

After a time, Algernon decided that it would be more sensible and more efficient to pay for such satisfactions and not to become involved with a girl whom he had to take out and be seen with by his friends. He had made the proper inquiries and found that there were establishments where what he wanted was available, and he had gone to them with system, twice a week, taking with him a book to study on the subway, a book which extended his knowledge about such subjects as some period in history, relativity physics, or mathematical logic.

“Often, however,” he explained to Marcus who admired him very much because he was a conventional success, “I merely study the faces in the subway, wonder what lives have produced such faces, and write sonnets about them when I get home.”

Marcus blazed with desire when he heard Algernon’s somewhat off-hand account of Irene. His own desires were orthodox and straight-forward, and such a girl was just what he longed for. He paid expensive court to Irene and took her to theatres, to the opera and to the ballet, night after night, being impatient. At the conclusion of two weeks, he proposed to Irene that she go to Atlantic City with him for the week-end. She refused flatly, and when he asked if she thought she might feel differently after six months, she said she was sure she would not, she was sorry, but to be perfectly frank, she found him unattractive. Marcus in anger replied that she had a capitalist and Hollywood conception of what was handsome, for he had been told by some girls that he was extremely attractive. He did not add that it was a colored girl to whom he had just paid ten dollars who had said: “Boy, are you handsome!”

No sooner had Marcus stopped seeing Irene than she began to go out with Ferdinand to whom she had been introduced by Marcus. The truth was that Marcus suspected Ferdinand of interviewing and seeking out Irene before his rejected week-end proposal.

Marcus was hurt, as if he had been betrayed. He saw no reason for Ferdinand’s being successful where he had failed, and he felt also that such a one as Ferdinand, precious and finicky, had been unfaithful to himself in going with a girl like Irene. He protested long, as if obsessed, to Edmund and Jacob. Both of them, perverted by Marcus’ stolid foolishness, provoked Marcus all the more.

Ferdinand hated Algernon and refused to acknowledge his existence when they passed on the street. The year before, Algernon’s father had hanged himself because of losses in the stock market, and the circle had had a merry time about this event, for none of them liked Algernon, whom they had known as a student. They had discovered that when they asked most acquaintances if they had heard about Algernon’s father, most of them said:

“Yes, he hanged himself!” and broke out laughing. The laughter was directed at Algernon as a prig, and not at the father, a small, quiet, extremely nervous man whom no one knew very well.

The outlandish answer and laughter continued so that as each newcomer was asked the question and broke into laughter, Ferdinand said:

“Look, everyone breaks out laughing,” and he was pleased.

And this had also been the inspiration of the most notorious instance of an incapacity to make conversation and engage in small talk, for one day Harry Johnson, an acquaintance of the circle and of Algernon, one renowned for shyness and insensitivity, had encountered Algernon soon after his father’s death. After several abortive efforts to make conversation with Algernon, who was no help whatever, Harry tried to break the silence between sentences.

“Say, what’s this I hear about your father hanging himself?” he inquired.

This question had been discussed for six months, especially by Rudyard who maintained that it was a direct expression of Harry’s hatred of Algernon.

Knowing how Ferdinand detested Algernon, Marcus felt that the one thing which would make him abandon Irene was the knowledge that she had been intimate with Algernon. This would certainly waken the finicky dandy in him.

Jacob was consulted by Marcus.

“Go ahead and tell him, if you like,” said Jacob, “but if you tell him, you may not take much pride in yourself hereafter.”

“After all, I am a friend of his,” said Marcus. “Perhaps it is my duty to tell him?”

“Who do you think you are making that remark to?” said Jacob. Marcus grinned in guilt and recognition. Then he suggested that perhaps Jacob, also a good friend of Ferdinand, ought to tell him about Irene and Algernon, since he had no personal stake.

“You ought to be dead,” said Jacob.

Meanwhile the news of the courtship grew. Ferdinand, who hardly ever lent a book to anyone, was lending certain selected works, long sacred to him, to Irene.

“This surely is serious,” said Jacob to Edmund.

Stiffly and shyly, Ferdinand was seen bringing Irene to see other treasures and curios of his private cult. It was like the loving son who for the first time brings his intended to see his mother and his father.

“This must mean marriage,” said Jacob.

Ferdinand undertook to supervise Irene’s habits of dress. He went with her to the dressmaker’s and he quickly persuaded her to shift from the garish to the elegant. She was surprised to find that he knew so much about dress and delighted that he cared about such matters.

He explained curtly that he had had several extra-marital relationships which had provided him with an opportunity to learn about such things. He made this explanation because he felt that he must make it clear that he had committed adultery, just as in other periods chastity was deemed a necessity and a virtue.

The two united extremes; it was the union of a brash, bright, full, open, vivacious and buxom girl to a constrained, meticulous, reserved and tormented young man.

The boys of the circle observed that strange changes also occurred in Ferdinand, now that he went with Irene. He had always abhorred politics, especially radical politics. Now he spoke with a venom he had once reserved for discourteous headwaiters of the infamy of the Stalinists.

“What does she have that I don’t have?” said Laura. No one answered her although conversation had concentrated upon Irene for an hour. The silence was sharp. Laura thrust her head forward.

“You’re no Adonis,” she said to Edmund.

“What did I do?” asked Edmund, moved at the same time to sympathy and laughter.

“She has thick ankles and her complexion is rotten,” said Laura.

“Who?” said Edmund.

“This too shall pass away,” quoted Laura, departing for the kitchen to get herself a fresh drink.

At that moment the door slammed like a gunshot and Marcus entered.

“Hello, hello, hello,” he shouted, the image of abounding good humor.

“What now?” said Jacob.

“What next?” said Edmund.

“I hear that Ferdinand has just married Irene,” said Marcus, enjoying the astonishment of this news. He drew forth the engraved card which announced that Ferdinand and Irene would be at home to their friends on Saturday night.

“You will get one tomorrow,” said Marcus, “I met Ferdinand in the street and he gave me one.”

“What are you so pleased about?” asked Laura. “You’re not the one who married Irene.”

“I have a very good reason to be pleased,” said Marcus, “I know something that Ferdinand does not know.”

“Shut up,” said Jacob, but vainly.

“What does he know?” asked Lloyd Tyler who had not heard about Irene’s intimacy with Algernon.

“This card is very fine,” said Jacob, shifting the subject, “it is just like Ferdinand to send a card as well-engraved as this.”

“It must have cost a pretty penny,” said Marcus, grinning.

Laura returned from the kitchen where she had listened as she drank. She replied to Lloyd’s question as if it had just been uttered.

“Marcus has been saying that Irene used to sleep with Algernon and he is going to tell Ferdinand.”

“Who says I am going to tell him?” said Marcus, trying to look indignant, but breaking into a fresh grin.

“You had better shut up,” said Jacob, all his authority in his tone. To himself he said: “Everyone does what he wants to do if he can, after paying his respects to scruple and compunction.”

“I won’t say anything,” said Marcus, whom Jacob alone was able to persuade to be silent. “But if I drink the champagne that Ferdinand is going to have, who knows what slips of the tongue, what lapsus linguae may not leak out? In vino veritas, they say!” he chortled, pleased that he had spoken Latin.

“Thank God that Rudyard is not here,” said Edmund, and all understood without a word what Edmund had in mind, how Rudyard more than Marcus would have made this marriage the subject of endless discussion until at last Ferdinand would think that his wife’s past was always talked about.

Clearly Marcus took pleasure in the fact that now that the marriage was accomplished, Ferdinand was helpless against the infamy unknown to him.

At that moment the absent hero, Ferdinand, appeared in the doorway and was greeted with congratulation which soon rose to acclamation.

“Who said that I am married?” asked Ferdinand, coldly.

“I said so. You said so. It says so on the card you gave me,” said Marcus, perplexed.

“I see no reason for making any unwarranted suppositions or assumptions on the basis of an engraved card,” said Ferdinand.

“This is stupendous,” said Edmund, for he saw that Ferdinand had a trump card up his sleeve.

“The fact is that I am not married,” Ferdinand declared. “It is possible that I may marry Irene in the near future, but at present we are merely very good friends who have decided to live together.”

Marcus capsized on the sofa. His dismay spread over his face as if he were at the dentist’s, his mouth open.

“What do you think of Algernon Nathan?” asked Marcus.

“You know well enough,” Ferdinand replied. “He is a knave and a fool. He is a coxcomb and a jackass, and he always will be, if he lives to a hundred.”

It was clear then that Marcus was seeking to suppress his own desire to tell Ferdinand about Irene’s intimacy with Algernon, for this knowledge was without meaning, if Ferdinand was not married to Irene.

The circle was stunned by Ferdinand’s declaration. It seemed to them an incomparable exhibition. The real right thing was not to get married until one wanted to get married and in the meantime to do as one liked, frankly and openly. Ferdinand had often formulated this attitude.

“What do you think of that?” Marcus asked Laura, for she alone often expressed conventional views about marriage.

“How much money does she make?” said Laura. “What is her yearly compensation?”

“Ten years hence,” said Edmund, “this evening will still be the subject of discussion and interpretation.” No one knew exactly what Laura meant, but it was clear in general that Laura intended to express contempt with the implication also that nothing good would come of such an arrangement.

Laura began to bring in cups, spoons, knives, forks, bread, jam and cheese for the midnight supper.

Marcus, defeated, felt nervous and bewildered. He fell back on a practice for which he had often been denounced, that of drawing upon a store of prepared jokes and epigrams.

“Say, speaking of marriage,” said Marcus, “I heard a good one the other day. A girl says to a friend of hers who is getting married soon: ‘Is your torso prepared?’”

The others looked at him in a frozen-faced silence.

“What’s the joke?” asked Jacob.

Marcus paled. He knew that he was being attacked. But he felt that he must attempt to justify his utterance.

“Don’t you see, she says torso when she means trousseau. It is a genuine Freudian lapsus linguae.”

“Enough of this Latin,” said Edmund, “it is a dead tongue, and your grammar would shame a Gaul of the second century.”

Marcus, persevering, launched a second effort.

“You are like the Irish,” he said laboriously, “it is as Dr. Johnson said, the Irish are a fair people; they do not speak well of anyone.”

“Spare us your prepared epigrams and quotations,” said Ferdinand, “they resemble canned music.”

“The trouble with you,” said Marcus, “is that you have no sense of humor. Algernon said you had none and I said that you were hilarious. But I see that I was wrong.”

This spontaneous remark was also a success. Everyone but Ferdinand laughed. He did not know why they laughed, but he was too clever to ask that it be explained to him, the trap which had often undone Marcus.

And now they all sat at the table, and ate and drank, and minds and hearts arose as if they danced. Marcus, seated next to Ferdinand, put his hand on his shoulder, and said, still warm with pleasure at the unexpected success of his remark about Ferdinand as humorless:

“You are a fine fellow, Ferdinand. I always admired you and no matter what you say or do, I will continue to admire you.”

“Shut up,” said Edmund, kicking Marcus under the table.

Ferdinand described his purchase of furniture and how he had imposed his scorn upon the merchants of furniture. It was a very interesting story.

“Say,” said Laura, returning from the kitchen where she had just taken her tenth drink, and hurling her lightning-bolt as if she spoke of the weather, “did you know that Irene slept for a whole year with Algernon Nathan?”

“Laura,” said Marcus, torn between guilt and the wish to appear to be the reproachful one.

“Yes,” said Ferdinand, “I heard all about it the first night I went out with Irene.” His tone was matter-of-fact. “What about it?”

“This Ferdinand is without a peer,” said Edmund, “he has no equal either in America or Europe.”

They all saw that Ferdinand had scored an unconditional triumph. It was impossible to make out if Ferdinand had actually known about Algernon, or with quick wit and perfect control recognized that he must not admit his ignorance.

“Are you going home now?” Jacob asked Edmund. “I have had enough pity and terror for one evening.”

“Yes,” said Edmund, who did not want to go but who wanted to hear what Jacob had to say about the evening.

“I will go with you,” said Marcus.

“You stay here or go by yourself,” said Jacob, “we don’t want you with us.” And on that note of judgment the young men left.

NINE: “A MILLION DOLLARS ARE WORTHLESS TO ME”

After long absence, Rudyard visited the teacher who had most befriended him in school, Percival Davis. After Rudyard had been seated in the study of Professor Davis and questioned about himself, Professor Davis said in a flat, but depressed, tone:

“I am dying.”

“We are all dying,” said Rudyard, uneasy and trying to find something to say.

“But I am dying faster than most human beings,” said Professor Davis, unwilling to permit Rudyard to extricate himself from the fact of his own death. “I may be dead in six months. The fact is, I probably will be.”

“I think that it would be boring to live forever,” said Rudyard, pleased by this comment, but still uncomfortable.

“Forever, perhaps: but I would like to live for at least a thousand years,” said Professor Davis passionately, “I would not be bored in the least. I would learn about every great school of painting, both in Europe and the Orient, and I would cultivate the best wines.”

“Yes, you’re right,” said Rudyard, hoping to shift the subject, “it would be wonderful to live for a thousand years!” He felt that through agreement he was at least polite.

Two months after, Percival Davis died of the heart attack he had expected. After hearing the news, Rudyard went strolling with Jacob and told him of the interview.

“It was not proper of him,” said Rudyard, “to confront me with his death. What was there to say? What a pity that we do not have formal utterances for all the important events of life.”

“You might have said,” Jacob remarked, “‘I hope you are wrong. I hope that you are not going to die very soon.’”

“What difference would that have made?” Rudyard replied.

They passed a church where a hearse and other cars awaited the departure for the cemetery. Jacob, as was his wont, wanted to pause to see the coffin carried from the church to the hearse, for now as ever the joys of strict observation were important to him. But Rudyard refused to stop.

“Who wants to see a funeral, anyway?” said Rudyard, and Jacob, discerning the excess of emotion in Rudyard’s voice, yielded to him.

“Two years ago, when a very gifted student died suddenly,” said Jacob, “Israel Brown was asked by the family to make the funeral sermon, for the family as well as the student were without religious belief. The sermon was given in the auditorium of the Ethical Culture School. Israel Brown spoke very well, as he always does. He spoke of the gifts of the dead young man, remarking upon his original gift for certain subjects and making clear the difficulty in general of mastering these subjects. Yet all felt that this might have been a classroom and not the ceremony for the death of a young man. Now what kind of a life is this, anyway? Something important and irreparable occurs and we have nothing to say.”

Moved by these thoughts, Jacob told Rudyard of a recent effort which he had kept secret. Six months before, in mid-winter when tours of the neighborhood were unpleasant, he had written a short novel, although he had never before thought of being that kind of an author. The short novel had seemed good to him. He had placed the manuscript in his desk “to cool off,” as he explained. When two months had passed, he had read his short novel again and decided that it was worthless. It was a Sunday afternoon in April, just before Jacob was due from habit and principle to tour the neighborhood and see what he entitled “the Sunday look.”

Depressed and benumbed that his short novel was worthless, Jacob arose from his desk, went to the window, and gazed at the park, full of human beings of each generation, infants, children, adolescents, parents, the middle-aged, and the old.

Regarding them, he said to himself, “I reject one million dollars, the highest prize of our society. For if I had one million dollars, what good would it do me? It would not help me to make this short novel, which is worthless, a short novel which is good. I can say then that I have discovered that a million dollars are worthless to me, since they cannot help me to satisfy the desire and hope which was important, intimate, and dear to me.”

Rudyard told the circle of this discovery when Jacob was absent, and they were very much moved and impressed. Often after that, when they were among strangers, they spoke of “the great moment,” and “the great rejection.” When strangers wished to know what this moment was, they were left unanswered, except that Edmund often said that Jacob had discovered the essential vanity and emptiness of our society. The success of these teasing sentences about “the great recognition,” made the boys invent variations, delicious to them, of the enigmatic sentences. It was said that Jacob has renounced a million dollars; Jacob has rejected a million dollars; Jacob has recognized that a million dollars are worthless.

Thus it came about that for the wrong reasons outsiders and strangers suffered the illusion that Jacob was a fabulous heir.

Yet at this time Jacob’s feeling about himself and about the circle was undergoing a change.

“We have all come to a standstill,” he said to himself, “as on an escalator, for time is passing, but we remain motionless.”

“What do I want?” he continued, “Do I know what I want? Does anyone know what he or she wants?”

He decided to visit Edmund, who had once again endured the period when scholarships and teaching appointments are awarded and who had once again been rejected. In seeking to find motives or reasons to explain his rejection, Edmund let himself go into a kind of hysteria, discussing the matter with anyone he found to listen, speaking of his rare and many labors, and making use of a terminology which no one but a peer in his subject could understand. This had occurred at this time for the past five years and the circle found Edmund’s obsession with it boring. Consequently when Francis French had entered in the midst of Edmund’s monologue with a piece of sensational news everyone had stopped listening to Edmund, and Edmund, much offended, arose and departed, and he had now been absent from the circle for more than a week.

This was the reason that Jacob, the conscience of the circle, visited Edmund, keeping silent, however, about Edmund’s offended departure.

“Do you know,” said Jacob, seating himself in an armchair in Edmund’s study, “practically everyone is unhappy, though few will admit the fact?”

“Yes,” said Edmund, pleased by the renewal of this theme, “that’s just what I’ve been thinking. It would be hard to overestimate the amount of unhappiness in America. The cause can’t be just the depression, though I don’t want to slight the depression, for obviously the rich are just as unhappy as the poor, though in different ways.”

“Yes,” said Jacob, “it is not only the depression. The depression is as much an effect as a cause, and the amount of unhappiness was perhaps as great in 1928 as in 1934.”

“I know just what you mean,” said Edmund, “I saw the other day that ninety-five per cent of the bathtubs in the world are in America. Now if anyone reflects sufficiently upon this interesting fact, he will conclude with the whole story of America.”

“Everyone feels that it is necessary to have certain things of a certain quality and kind,” said Jacob.

“Bathtubs come from an obsession with personal hygiene, the most consummate form of Puritan feeling,” said Edmund, “but the essential point is that human beings waste the best years of their only life for the sake of such a thing as a shining automobile, the latest model. Since such things are regarded as the truly important, good, and valuable things, is it any wonder that practically everyone is unhappy?”

“The fault is not this desire for things,” said Jacob, “but the way in which the motive of competition is made the chief motive of life, encouraged everywhere. Think of how competition is celebrated in games, in schools, in the professions, in every kind of activity. Consequently, the ideas of success and of failure are the two most important ideas in America. Yet it’s obvious that most human beings are going to be failures, for such is the nature of competition. Perhaps then the ideas of success and failure ought to be established as immoral. This strikes me as a truly revolutionary idea, although I suppose it has occurred to others.”

“It has occurred to you,” said Edmund, “as it has occurred to me because we are both failures, and we have to be young men in a time of failure and defeat, during the black years of the great depression.”

“Yes, we are both failures,” said Jacob, “but I have no desire for the only kinds of success that are available. The other day I heard the cruelest question I ever expect to hear. Two composers met at a music festival in the Berkshires last summer and one of them said to the other: ‘Calvin, why are we both failures?’ That’s more cruel than any other question I ever heard. The other one answered him in a hurry: ‘I am not a failure,’ he said, ‘I am not a failure because I never wanted to be a success.’ That’s the way I feel too. Nevertheless the fact remains that practically everyone is unhappy. Now if the idea of love supplanted the ideas of success and failure, how joyous everyone might be! and how different the quality of life!”

“You’re just dreaming out loud,” said Edmund to Jacob, thinking again of how he had failed once more to be appointed a teacher.

TEN: “THE BEST PLEASURE IS TO GIVE PLEASURE”

The circle altered as the great depression was stabilized and modified. The idleness which had been beyond reproach because no one was successful, because most were frustrated, because the parents’ generation had lost so much of its grip and pride, ended, for now there were jobs for everyone, although not the jobs each one wanted. Some had gone to Washington to take the new Federal jobs made necessary by the New Deal, and in New York too it was no longer difficult to get a job. Rudyard refused to be employed in the Federal project for playwrights, authors, musicians, and other artists, and he defended his refusal, as from the first, by speaking of his principles. Laura was angry at this refusal, but after a time she declared once again that Rudyard was a genius and he ought not to have to earn a living.

Soon all who belonged to the circle except Rudyard and Jacob had jobs which enabled them to pay for the modest round of luxuries upon which Ferdinand insisted. The theatre began to be for Ferdinand a kind of ritual. No matter how poor the play was, the ceremonial of going to the first night of a Broadway play had for Ferdinand the rigorous and expensive qualities he had desired since he put aside his desire to be an author. His marriage became by imperceptible degrees of which no one dared to speak, a recognized union, but this did not change in the least Ferdinand’s participation in the circle or his mode of life. Irene was accepted by the circle as being just like Marcus, and the circle’s judgment of her was formulated by Rudyard when he said: “Personally, I like her,” a statement which meant that he understood very well all the reasons for not liking Irene, and which was understood by all to mean that Irene was detestable.

Marcus went to Bermuda for the Christmas holidays, and at Easter he went to Cuba, trips paid for by his labors in the public school system. After his trip to Cuba, he spoke of the Weltanschauung of the cabin cruise and of the nature of time and duration on a luxury liner. Rudyard declared that Marcus had become a beachcomber and an idler. When Marcus replied that Rudyard was in no position to accuse anyone of being an idler, Rudyard told him that he was being ridiculous. “Don’t be too obvious,” said Rudyard to Marcus, “it is expected that you will be obvious, but please draw the line somewhere.” Roaring, Marcus answered: “Obvious, obvious! what do you mean, obvious? If I say that the sun is shining, I suppose you will say that I am being obvious.” “Yes!” said Rudyard in triumph and joy. “Who discusses the weather? Who discusses sunlight? We are not peasants. The weather is an old story, it is old hat.”

Soon after this exchange, Rudyard was asked if he wanted to teach the drama in a girl’s school in Cleveland, Ohio. The job was excellent and Rudyard was extremely pleased. “Such is the mystery of this life,” he said. “The secret missions and visits of Milady Fortune, a well-known lady of the evening, are invariably surprises. Had I sought this job, I would not have received it. Just because I did not strive for it, it was given to me. All good things are given, not gained by the effort of the will.”

No one paid attention to this comment and interpretation, because more interesting by far was the topic of the effect of Rudyard’s departure on the circle as such. Edmund declared that Rudyard ought not to become a teacher, since he had dedicated himself to the writing of plays. Edmund quoted some of Rudyard’s best past arguments in defense of his mode of life, and concluded with the statement that Rudyard would feel unhappy and estranged when he was so far from the circle. Laura was affected the most. She was excited and pleased for a moment, and then she was terrified. She said to Rudyard repeatedly that she might well ask to be sent to Cleveland by the department store which employed her. But Rudyard felt that he had had enough of life with Laura. He told her that he did not consider such a move a wise one for her, and he suggested that she secure a smaller apartment, for he did not intend to return to the city in the summer, he was going to be in the country. Ferdinand agreed with both Rudyard and Edmund. They were both his friends and whatever they said or did was right.

Edmund and Jacob discussed the fate of the circle after Rudyard’s departure. Jacob felt that the circle would continue certainly and some of the others, overshadowed by Rudyard’s energy, might now realize new possibilities in themselves. He observed how year by year Rudyard’s authority had diminished so that now Ferdinand truly dictated the circle’s mode of life more and more, as he earned more and more money. When he said this, Jacob explained as before that he himself did not truly belong to the circle. This was a necessity to each of them, to maintain that he himself was but a visitor or stranger, although the others truly belonged to the circle.

As Rudyard prepared to depart, he said again to his sister that she surely ought to move to a smaller apartment, since it was unlikely that they were ever going to live with each other again. The other boys said nothing, but they felt it cruel and unnecessary for Rudyard to dictate to Laura. Edmund suggested to Ferdinand in private that perhaps Rudyard did not want the circle to exist when he was absent. Hearing Rudyard say petulantly to Laura for the fourth time that it was senseless for her not to move elsewhere, Lloyd said with naiveté that then they would all be deprived of their community. “Yes, that’s just it,” said Rudyard, his face full of annoyance and distaste, “I don’t want Laura to provide a clubhouse anymore.” Laura became furious. “You were willing enough for me to do that until now,” she said. “Never,” Rudyard replied, “I never wanted you to provide a second home for the boys.” He spoke with a self-righteous tone because he was sensitive now about the fact that he had been dependent upon Laura.

The week-end before Rudyard was to depart for Cleveland, Ohio, it was decided that a farewell party ought to be given for him. Ferdinand immediately declared that as a matter of fact he was going to contribute a case of champagne to this party. As his prosperity mounted, his gestures became more and more of a systematic extravagance. Laura wanted to make dinner for the whole circle, but Edmund dissuaded her. The question of who was to be invited to this party among those on the edge of the circle, the visiting strangers and the accepted newcomers, became the subject of intensive discussion.

The whole circle dined at the best restaurant in the neighborhood and Ferdinand insisted upon paying the check. “He is beside himself,” said Edmund to Jacob, “this departure means more to him than he knows.”

By the time everyone had returned to the Bell household, Laura was drunk. This was no less than was expected, for Laura had been drinking every night for weeks. But no one expected the speech she began to make as soon as the champagne was opened.

“Five years ago, just about the time when we all began to see each other,” said Laura, rocking and gaining the attention of all by the loudness and shrillness of her voice, “I read a story by Rilke. I think it was Rilke. It was just a very short story. It was just a page and a half, and it may have been less. It was very good. I don’t remember all of it, but what I remember was very good. The story is about wandering Siberians. They are hunters and they hunt wild cows on the Siberian steppes or tundras, or something. Anyway, they hunt for wild cows.”

Rudyard, annoyed, said: “Laura has established the fact that they were hunters. She has made that clear.” He was obviously impatient with Laura.

“Never mind,” said Laura, “the main thing is that the Siberians spear the wild cows like cowboys on horseback. And when the poor cow is bleeding to death, the hunter lays down on one side of the cow and chews big pieces of meat from the side of the cow. This is just like many other stories so far. The different part is that on the other side of the cow, the horse also lays down and chews out big pieces of meat.”

“The story,” said Rudyard, “is by Kafka, not Rilke, and you have distorted it.” He took a book from the shelf, turned to the proper page and read aloud, pausing after each sentence.

“‘Their very horses live on meat. Often a rider lies down beside his horse. Then both feed on the same piece of meat.’

“The story,” Rudyard continued in a critical voice, “is about nomads, not Siberians. It is nomads who come to the capital. They eat butchers’ meat, which they have stolen from butchers’ vans. The meat comes from the slaughter house and nothing is said about eating living cows who are bleeding to death. You have changed the story in a way familiar to me because I know how your memory distorts many things, making what has happened more brutal and more cruel than it was in actual fact.”

“Never mind,” said Laura. “Let’s say that I wrote the story then. I wrote the story from my knowledge of life. But I am the cow, and you,” she said pointing at Rudyard, “are the nomad, the Siberian, and you,” she said, pointing to the other boys, “are the horses, chewing on the other side.”

“I am not a horse,” said Marcus, who was amused and thought this a witticism.

“Shut up,” said Edmund to Marcus.

“If you expect too much from human beings,” said Jacob, “you are bound to be disappointed.”

“I never expected anything unusual,” said Laura, “all I ever wanted was what everyone else has.”

“This is getting hysterical,” said Marcus, who was always slow. “What a party!”

“Can’t you think of anything good to say about any of us?” asked Jacob in a kind voice.

“I can,” said Laura, “but if I lean backwards anymore, I will fall down and injure my spine, to coin a phrase.” Laura reached for a glass of champagne, which Rudyard tried to keep her from getting. But he was unsuccessful.

“I don’t have what I want,” said Jacob to Laura, “and I don’t think that many of us have what we want.”

“Yes,” said Rudyard, returning to his own kind of rhetoric, “I too may say that I am disappointed. My plays are not performed, although many of them are masterpieces, if I may say so. I think I may say without immodesty that I am superior to the age in which I live. I pay for my superiority to Broadway by leading this life of obscurity. Yet I do not seek out a scapegoat, as you do, Laura. Furthermore, we ought to remember that this life is a mystery in which each of us is given by God his own gifts and shortcomings. To live is better than anything else! Let us take pleasure in life!”

“Never mind,” said Laura, “if you like, go ahead and say that God gave me a plain face and made me full of self-pity. What am I going to do about it? Do you think I ought to take pleasure in it? I want a husband like all the other girls. I don’t want to be left alone.”

“In my late adolescence,” said Edmund, “life seemed to me to be Shakespearean. But now as I get older I see that life really resembles the stories of Dostoyevsky.”

“Enough of these literary allusions,” said Laura. “You’re no Karamazov.”

This new version of Laura’s famous sentence, “You’re no Adonis,” drew forth reminiscent laughter lacking in vigor because Laura stood before them, cold-faced.

“Marriage is not so important,” said Irene, who had been silent and who, as a newcomer, had not really understood what Laura was saying.

“What do you have that I don’t have?” said Laura to Irene, quoting herself again.

Jacob arose and it was natural that all should accept this moment as belonging to him.

“The fact is,” said Jacob, in a low and careful voice, “we all have each other and we all need each other. Laura’s story was a very good story, whether it was written by Rilke or Kafka. All of us consume each other, and life without such friends as we are to each other would be unbearable. The best pleasure of all is to give pleasure to another being. Strange as it seems, I see this truth every day when I give my cat his dinner, and I see how unbearable solitude is when I come home and he is pleased to see me, and I am pleased that he is pleased.”

“I am not a cat,” said Laura, unwilling to be consoled by mere analogy, “I am a girl.”

“Each of us,” said Jacob, “has been disappointed and most of us will continue to be disappointed. It would be foolish to try to say that the disappointment is not painful or that it is good for us or that it is necessary. Yet, on the other hand, which of us would really like to be dead? Not one of us would prefer that his life had ended in childhood or infancy, and that he had not lived through the years he has lived. Since this is true of the past, it is likely that it will be true of the future, and in the same way. By the same way, I mean that we will not get what we want; our desires will not be richly satisfied; but nonetheless we will be pleased to live through the years, to be conscious each day and to sleep every night.”

“Not me,” said Laura, “speak for yourself.” She took another glass of champagne.

“You do not know what you are saying, Laura,” said Edmund. Taking a book in his hand, he too read aloud:

“‘When one is upset by anger, then the heart is not in its right place; when one is disturbed by fear, then the heart is not in its right place; when one is blinded by love, then the heart is not in its right place; when one is involved in anxiety, then the heart is not in its right place. When the mind is not present, we look, but do not see, listen but do not hear, and eat but do not know the flavor of the food.’”

“I am wearing my heart on my sleeve,” said Laura, unmoved, “all the sentences in all the books will not do away with my disappointment.”

“How about your love?” asked Marcus.

“I don’t have any love,” said Laura.

“How much money do I make?” said Edmund.

“We can’t just run on like this,” said Jacob, “and yet nothing seems to do any good.”

Laura had begun to cry and those who saw her tears tried to make believe that they did not see them.

“I just don’t like it,” she said, sobbing, “I am going to get out of this house.” She started for the door. Edmund and Ferdinand took hold of her and dissuaded her.

“Have some more to drink,” said Marcus in an effort to be helpful.

“I am going to try again,” said Jacob, “since there is nothing else to do but try again.” He said this as to himself and then he spoke loudly and clearly:

“The world is a wedding. I read this sentence in an old book last week. I had to think for two days before I had any conception of what this sentence The world is a wedding was supposed to mean. Does it mean anything? Yes, and it means everything. For example, it means that the world is the wedding of God and Nature. This is the first of all the marriages.

“It was natural that I should think of Pieter Breughel’s picture, ‘The Peasant Wedding.’ Do you remember what that picture looks like? If you look at it long enough, you will see all the parts that anyone and everyone can have. But it is necessary to belong to a circle of friendship, such as ours, if one is to be present at the wedding which is this world.”

“The world is a marriage of convenience,” said Laura drunkenly, “the world is a shot-gun marriage. The world is a sordid match for money. The world is a misalliance. Every birthday is a funeral and every funeral is a great relief.”

“I only went to a wedding once,” said Francis. He spoke in a low voice but with an intensity which made everyone listen. “It was the wedding of my older sister at the age of thirty-six.

“The bridegroom’s mother, who was eighty-five, was brought in a taxi to the ceremony. She paid no attention to the ceremony, but kept telling my mother how, at the home for the aged where she lived, she was persecuted and other old men and women pampered; but my younger sister and I listened to what she said because it was more interesting than the ceremony itself. One thing we kept noticing was that the bride was at least a head taller than the bridegroom.

“Then the old lady was sent back to the home for the aged in a taxi, after getting my mother to promise to see her. After her departure, the wedding party went to the big downtown hotel where the bride and bridegroom had taken a room for the night. My younger sister and I kept getting more and more disappointed because we had never been to a wedding before, and we thought that all weddings must be like this. Up in the hotel room where we had been sent to wash, we looked at the twin beds and giggled. Then we stopped giggling because the room looked as depressing as everything else. We had dinner in the big dining room downstairs, the bridegroom, the bride, my mother, my younger sister and myself. No one had very much to say to anyone else. It was just as if we were having dinner on a rainy Sunday. After dinner ended, we said goodbye to the bridegroom and the bride, and we went home in the subway. I had homework to do and my sister had to practice her piano lessons. We asked my mother if in honor of the occasion we might not postpone the homework and the lessons, and she said the wedding was all over.”

Francis paused. He had become almost breathless as he continued his story.

“I want to ask all of you this question,” he said. “Do I agree with Jacob that the world is a wedding, or don’t I? What do all of you think?”

“You’re right,” said Laura, “and he is wrong.”

“In the beautiful picture by Pieter Breughel,” said Jacob, disregarding what Francis and Laura had just said, “you can see a squatting child on the floor, sucking his thumb which is sticky with something sweet. Standing by the table are two musicians, bearing bagpipes. One is young, handsome and strong; he is dressed in brown and his cheeks are puffed out. The other musician is unkempt and middle-aged. He looks far away as if he were thinking of his faded hopes. The serving men are carrying a long tray full of pies. The bride is seated beneath the red-white mistletoe and on her face is a faint smile, as if she thought of what did not yet exist. The bridegroom is leaning back and draining down the ale from a fat stein. He drinks as if he were in the midst of a long kiss. Nearby is a dwarf and at the head of the table a priest and a nun are conversing with each other. Neither of them will ever have a husband or a wife. On the right hand of the bride, an old man looks ahead at nothing, holding his hands as if he prayed. He has been a guest at many wedding feasts! He will never be a young man again! Never again will youth run wild in him!

“Opposite the bride are the fathers and the mothers, all four. Their time is passed and they have had their day. Yet this too is a pleasure and a part for them to play. I can’t tell which is the suitor whom the bride refused, but I know he is there too, perhaps among the crush that crowds the door. He is present and he looks from a distance like death at happiness. Meanwhile in the foreground a handsome young man pours from a jug which has the comely form of a woman’s body the wine which will bring all of them exaltation like light. His bending body is curved in a grace like harps or violins. Marcus, open a new bottle.”

Marcus obeyed, and after the pop, the puff, the foam, and the flow, he poured the wine in glasses.

“I suppose everything is all right,” said Laura, “I suppose everything is just fine.”

“No,” said Jacob, “I don’t mean to say that this life is just a party, any kind of party. It is a wedding, the most important kind of party, full of joy, fear, hope, and ignorance. And at this party there are enough places and parts for everyone, and if no one can play every part, yet everyone can come to the party, everyone can come to the wedding feast, and anyone who does not know that he is at a wedding feast just does not see what is in front of him. He might as well be dead if he does not know that the world is a wedding.”

“You can’t fool me,” said Laura, “the world is a funeral. We are all going to the grave, no matter what you say. Let me give all of you one good piece of advice: Let your conscience be your bride.”