Barbary Shore (34 page)

McLeod drew his breath. “War is permanent and the last argument of the apologist is no better than the first. If one bloc should vanquish the other, it will find itself almost totally impoverished. It will repeat at even a lower level the necessity to wage war which now besets the sole representative in the world today of state capitalism. Its impoverishment enormous, the winner will find it impossible to set up the rational exploitation which could solve his problems. Instead, he must exploit as extravagantly as he dares not only the vanquished but his former allies as well. His demands must be so great in relation to what is left that a new military situation develops before the last has ceased. The war begins again with a new alignment of forces, and to the accompaniment of famine and civil war, the deterioration continues until we are faced with mankind in barbary.”

“Is the speech over?” Hollingsworth cried.

“So you come soon to power,” McLeod said quietly, “but you have merely inherited the crisis, and yours is the profit of cancer.”

“Finish!” Hollingsworth commanded.

Like caps attached to the same cord, each detonation induced the next, until abruptly the air was clear. “I am obliged to discuss the perspective for socialism,” McLeod said in a slow voice. “It will take still a few more minutes and then I will be done.”

Hollingsworth hitched himself back in his seat. “I am not here to be insulted. Your remarks must be indirect.”

“There is a choice to reverse the process I have outlined. It occupies no prominence at present, and yet it is all we have. I speak of that body of ideas and that program which may loosely be called revolutionary socialism. It conceives of a society where the multitude own and control the means of production in opposition to what exists everywhere today. It holds the true conception of equality where each works according to his ability and each is supplied according to his needs. It views the end of exploitation and the beginning of justice. It is the antithesis of all I have predicted.

“But how may it come about? Here we arrive at what is the knot of history. We assumed for far too long that socialism was inevitable and the error has reduced us to impotence. Socialism is inevitable only if there will be a civilization. What we have never considered is the condition that there would not be. For socialism as I have remarked is not a passive rag to be cut to shape by the politician’s scissor. It depends upon the potentiality of the human, and that is an open question, impossible to determine philosophically. Well may it be that men in sufficient numbers and with sufficient passion and consciousness to create such a world will never exist. If they do not, however,
then the human condition is incapable of alleviation, and we can only witness for a century at least and perhaps forever the disappearance of all we have created.

“I speak in the most abstract and general terms and that explains little. We face today a situation which is almost hopeless. The splinters and fragments of revolutionary socialism are scattered, shards of a black time, and the world proletariat, inert and in historic stupor, belongs almost completely to one bloc or the other. Beyond the horizon, in the most backward continent on earth, revolutionary ferments are breeding, and the pity is that they are already dominated by the representatives of state capitalism. With the war little is calculated to improve. It is likely that the degeneration of humanity will occur even more rapidly than the deterioration of the state, and by the time the Colossi will have butchered each other to the size of a hundred Lilliputs, it may not be considered probable that revolutionary socialism will play a prominent part in the civil wars to follow. Certainly the destruction of the greater portion of the productive capacity of the world will be an almost insurmountable problem. The hope is that the state deteriorates more rapidly than the people, and in counter to the fantastic atrocities and inequalities of state capitalism, there will remain in the masses strength and conviction to deal with it. Such a condition will produce, I believe, its revolutionary consciousness. If once within our time the locomotives of history were running, and in contrast to the ten years which passed like a day, there was the day which was the equivalent of ten years, then the Lenin of tomorrow may be presented with a century in an hour. It is my hope that a revolutionary determination, the like of which has never been seen before will sweep the earth, and these theses, difficult, recondite, and often incomprehensible, will match the experience of even the most inarticulate peasant, so that the socialist theorist will once again find language to reach the many.

“That there be theorists at such a time is of incalculable importance. The culture of a revolutionary socialist is not created in a day, and not too many of us will be alive. Yet there must be some to participate, for revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most. It is not a question of a party now, nor recruiting drives, nor attempts to match the propaganda of the blast furnace with the light of our candle. It is the need to study, it is the obligation to influence those few we may, and if some nucleus of us rides out of the storm, we shall advance to the front of any revolutionary wave, for we alone shall have the experience and the insight so vital for the period. Then we shall be the only ones capable of occupying the historical stage.

“The problems we shall face. A specter will haunt us and fittingly so. The ghost of that other revolution will be always with us. For if we forget, if we ever suppose that the party or parties which form can answer everything, then our action and our suffering as well as the sacrifice and determination of millions of men and women may again be lost. There is no dogma we can carry with us, no legal machinery we can invoke. There are only two principles, freedom and equality, and without them we are nothing. The absence of the one involves obligatorily the corruption of the other, and this is the lesson which must be learned. There will be crises if we are resolute; there will be voices who speak who would be better silent, there will be idle machines and men who refuse to work, there will be disruption and inefficiency, but if the mass and we cannot surmount that, if we cannot find the means to guarantee the freedom of all and their equality, then the revolution shall be lost again, and the potentiality of man will not have proven equal to the challenge.

“But, if we succeed, what a period will follow! I am not a prophet dreaming of heaven, I do not assume that we leap at a bound from hell to Arcady. At last there will be, however, a soil in which man may play out his drama. It will be a time of the most extraordinary contrasts, a time of despair as well as
of hope, a moment when each injustice which is ended may birth another, one we cannot conceive as yet. There is so little we know about ourselves, our historical life has been spent in battling nature and each other. This will be the opportunity to discover of what we are capable and what we shall never achieve. We may even learn if we can attain a rational life or if we are condemned to remain forever the most tragic of the animals. It will be the first time in history that man freed of hostile environment shall be able to discover his real dilemmas and real fulfillment if there is any. How I wish I could see the day. It would be so much more interesting than our own.”

He had come forward in his chair, his face animated. He had forgotten himself and where he was, and for an instant the future might have opened before him with its promise to a youth of spring, adventure, and reward. He blinked his eyes slowly, as if this image were the most difficult to capture and the most quickly lost.

Hollingsworth spoke with ferocity. “You indulge yourself. Hear, hear!” and he clapped his hands. “You’re an old man and you indulge yourself.”

McLeod’s speech ended. The lines came back to his face, the twitch regained its rhythm, and his voice grew dull. “I have been talking a long time,” he said in answer.

“A long time?” Hollingsworth was shrill. “You wasted a fellow’s patience. And for what? All that abuse. You talk about this high-and-mighty project, and then you talk about the next one. If I didn’t understand the value of politeness …” He cut himself short. “Would you say,” he asked in a penetrating voice, “that a fellow like yourself with all the things you’ve done, would you say that such a fellow isn’t a little tired?”

Apparently McLeod did not trust himself to speak. Slowly his head nodded forward and back.

“You think such a fellow is energetic enough to live through all he says is going to happen? And then at the end of it he’s
going to make a big revolutionary spiel? You’re just like an old thing,” Hollingsworth said furiously. “Babble, babble, babble about how sweet it used to be. Only you make it the future.”

Stony fruit to stony palate, McLeod sucked upon his knuckle, resting motionless but for the action of his lips, so that he might have been a statue, the marble curved upon itself. Deprived of nourishment through the years it was only now his mouth could water.

“And if you ever did live to such a time,” Hollingsworth continued, “and the revolutionaries could get together, what would you do there? We checked up on you pretty thoroughly. You don’t have any contact with anybody now, and for good reason. Even those pieces of paper you write. You mail them anonymously to people you think might be interested. You’re ashamed of yourself,” Hollingsworth shouted. “You think you’re so superior, you still lock down on me. But I at least talk to you. Those wonderful revolutionaries of yours—why if what you say comes to pass, they won’t have anything to do with you. You’re beyond the pale. Don’t forget your record. Don’t ever forget that.”

“Nor will you let me,” McLeod said in a small voice. He removed his finger from his mouth and watched the light shining on the moistened skin. “It’s true,” he whispered. “What more do you want?”

“I want you to concede,” Hollingsworth said.

“But I told you I would.”

“Yes, and I know you. While you were talking you had the idea that maybe you wouldn’t. And with me a bargain is a bargain. I hold you to it.”

McLeod looked at his knuckle. “Is it to you, or to your department?”

“Oh, I’m ahead of you, don’t worry about that,” Hollingsworth said in the same furious tone. “Trying to frighten a fellow. You have the idea you can make a better deal at my office.
Well, you can’t. I’m your best deal and . . you’re to give it to me.

“I concede,” McLeod sighed.

Lannie had begun to weep. “What are you doing?” she cried aloud, but I could not tell to whom she spoke.

“I suppose we must have a private conversation,” Hollingsworth said. “It’ll take time, won’t it?” McLeod nodded. “Well, I don’t mind so long as the bargain is kept.”

Much as if he were revolted to look at Lannie or at me, McLeod said quietly, “Lovett, I’ll have to ask you to leave the room.”

“I don’t want to leave,” I said. “You can’t give it to him.”

Now, he did look at me, and his eyes were blank. “Ah, but there’s not an alternative. You might as well go, Lovett.”

Lannie had finished weeping. Her eyes dry, her face stiff, she stood up slowly and drifted toward the door.

“Oh, go now, go, will you!” Hollingsworth exclaimed with irritation.

So we went, Lannie and I, stood looking at each other in the gloomy silence of the attic hall, and then separated, she to her room, and I to mine. Behind us in the room, the battle over, the casualties counted, terms were being drawn.

And it was I who felt the shame.

I
MUST
have lain awake all that night, sometimes in darkness, sometimes—fear swelling each sound—with the lamp burning by my bed. And through the night the casual noise of the house and the city outside was repeated for was this the hundredth time? and yet, repetition or no, I shuddered with terror and undefined sorrow, as unashamedly miserable as a child in the immensity of an empty house.

Sometime during the night I heard them leave the room across the hall and walk silently down the stairs. Later, my flesh roused like water over which blows the wind, I thought I listened to someone sobbing, and from my solitude I was marooned in equal grief. Somewhere—was it in the distance or from one of the rooms in the house?—I could hear a baby crying against the wash of a drunken quarrel.

Each of them passed before me, magnified, exaggerated, conducting a monologue to which I was audience, justifying, condemning, pleading, merciless, until vertigo-spun, the night might have carried me in all its heat to a ship at equator. Lannie sang her songs, Hollingsworth giggled, and McLeod sucking at the mordant candy-drop he must always pouch in his cheek, said from his great distance, “Grieve not, m’bucko, for it’s kismet, and that’s the secret of it all.”

And Guinevere holding Monina at arm’s distance while the child pummeled the air and screamed in frustration that she could not wound her mother’s flesh, delivered herself of a protest. “I’m a young woman, Lovett,” and a young woman, Lovett, “I’d a gone off and eaten the hey nonny nonny. But there’s the child you see, and I’d mug her to death, but she won’t leave me.”

So they danced, and the night opened its furnace, and my head burned.

I greeted the light of morning with all the sick, sore, and nausea-ridden appurtenances of a thundering drunk. The heat straddled my limbs and I wrestled my bedding; if the night were bad, the day promised little improvement. Had I conducted dialogues with them through the night, and had they sat up my bed? At least one I had to see, Lannie at least, and suffered the panic that a train had left and I had missed it by a minute. Yet after I dressed and descended the stairs, I found myself going back to the room again. There was my typewriter, and somehow I did not want to leave it there. Why I took it with me I hardly knew, but within the hour I had dropped it in a pawnshop and following my impulse to the end, the name I gave was not my own and the address I wrote was a street which did not exist. There was still the novel and that I put in an envelope and mailed it to my new name at the central post office. In a day or two, or perhaps a week, I would pick it up. These errands done, I felt it was possible to return to the house and visit Lannie.