The Oasis (11 page)

For while there was perceptible in the realists the dawn of an ethical attitude, a certain subordination of self to the requirements of the general welfare, an idea, at worst, that here they were answerable for their deeds to someone and not simply to an historical process, which condemned nothing but failure, these symptoms of improvement were unaccompanied by any revision of their official preconceptions or their general outlook on life. These remained intact and indeed untouchable. The happiness they were experiencing during all this month of June, they refused to take into account in formulating a social theory; while turning an old butter-churn or milking a cow by hand, they continued to make the statement that you can’t turn the clock back, as though this postulate were unshakable. Once the colony had won their approval, they began to treat the enterprise as an exceptional case, a weird freak of circumstance, which could
not be repeated under any other conditions. Nothing, they insisted, was proved by what was happening here: the weather had been favorable, the personnel carefully chosen; the hotel and its mountain vistas an incomparably lucky find. No lesson, therefore, could be learned here which would have a general application; and in fact the more smoothly the tenor of life began to run, the more they dismissed the colony as being false to the total picture. The ordinary man, they maintained, was incapable of revising his habits to the extent that they themselves were doing, though only a few months before they had maintained the same thing about intellectuals.

In their refusal to admit that anything was being demonstrated by the experiment, something more than a quibble was involved. There was an aspect of this multiple virtuousness that they found precarious and unsettling. As the days flowed on, and the corn grew in the fields, the hay was got in on time and the cows and the chickens were producing, they became more and more conscious of a sense of unreality, as if they were in a dream or behaving atypically in public.
The experience of the age
was a phrase to conjure with in their circles; and whatever could be alleged against them, they felt secure at least in their period-authenticity. Now, since the moment of their arrival in Utopia, they had felt cut off from their era, in a very curious way. The wholesomeness of the Utopian life, the success that was rewarding their efforts, the vast scale of the scenery, the good impulses they felt, all
seemed to them to lack what they called relevance, to be out of date, like a tone poem or the verse of the Lake minstrels. And so, while responsive to these experiences, they continued to hold them at a certain distance, as if they were not
for them
. When they said, therefore, that the Utopian lesson had no larger validity, they meant that there was a part of themselves which Utopia did not touch; boredom and urban cynicism had become so natural to them that an experience from which these qualities were absent seemed to be, in some way, defective.

As the month passed, however, connections with the world were resumed. Visitors came and went; Utopia was written up in the newspapers. A photographer came from
Life
, and, smiling into the camera, even the doubters experienced that sense of naïve verification that the inexperienced traveler feels when he buys a picture postcard of his hotel and inscribes an x by his room. A hand-press was quickly imported; they had decided to publish a magazine. The work in the fields went on, but since they were not growing for the market, the total labor required from each person amounted to only five hours a day. In the evenings, in the big lounge, by the oil lamps, they began to have lectures and readings from the poets and philosophers. A scene from Moliere was put on. The clergyman held services on Sundays, which were attended mainly out of curiosity. A waterfall was discovered in the forest, and they swam in the pool at its foot, with Taub like a chthonic deity looking on from a rock in his shorts.

Bicycles were bought; they went on picnics in the neighborhood. The women made bread and cakes; Susan Hapgood had a birthday. They found watercress in the brook, tangled with the pale forget-me-nots. The first young lettuces were eaten, and cauldrons of mustard-greens boiled. And, like a pocket mirror held up at a distance reflecting their own husbandry, far off, across the valley, the fields of the remote farmer altered with the advancing season, but so swiftly that it seemed as if overnight contrasting strips of pale green were laid down, like lengths of carpet on the mountainside, supplanting the dun-brown, and supplanted in turn by lemon-yellows, then golds, then brown again, as a clover-crop was turned under or a field of mustard harvested.

In the real world, the war still held off: a letter arrived from Monteverdi—he was alive but in hiding. “The only hope,” he wrote them, “is in small insurgent communities, peripheral movements …” Katy Norell wept, with shining St. Joan eyes, as the letter was read aloud on the verandah by Francis, the minister, and the realists averted their glance but maintained a respectful attitude, like unbelievers in a church. “Oh, dear, we haven’t done
enough
!” cried Katy desperately, when it was finished, banging her knuckles on a table and confronting them all with this self-indictment. It seemed to her that Monteverdi relied on them to spread the message abroad, and that they had failed him by becoming merely self-subsistent; the others, however saddened or thoughtful, felt no impulse to
join her in a
Domine non sum dignus
which, for all its sincerity, had so clearly personal a reference; she was comparing herself, with all her shortcomings and weaknesses, to the great work the letter suggested to her. She wept because
she
was not perfect. “I don’t know, Katy,” answered Susan, easily. “It seems to me we’ve done mighty well.”

An unsettled relation existed between these two learned women, in which there was a good deal of rational accord without sympathy. Monteverdi’s letter had not excited Susan, except in so far as it contained good news of himself; his remarks about small groups, peripheral action, et cetera, she found rather unimpressive—naturally, he would put faith in such movements; why not; he was an anarchist. A distrust of libertarian doctrines had stuck with her from her Marxist days. Over a period of years, she had watched her friends, one by one, having made the break from Marxism, plunge with exhilaration into Proudhon and Tolstoy, but her normally curious nature felt no inclination to share an experience so uncorseted. “That side” of the colony made her intelligence squirm, and her silence was a protest which, in her opinion, should have acted as a constraint on others, but which did not at all seem to do so, so that she felt obligated from time to time to put in an official disclaimer, when she really should have preferred or so she daily assured herself to bracket the matter altogether. She thought that it should have been plain enough to Katy and her associates that she, rather violently, did not wish to “go
in” for Monteverdi’s ideas, lest they destroy her liking for him—he himself, in former days, when they used to meet in company, had shown a greater delicacy and seemed, by his shyness, almost to co-operate in her reluctance to having exposed to her the contents of his mind. Susan’s small-town courtesy prompted her to ignore, even in private, what did not bear thinking about. She read Tolstoy, of course, but a certain virginal decorum preserved her from his ideas. “I look on him primarily as a novelist,” she would demur when someone tried to wring from her at least an awareness of his message. Exercising what she considered to be the same charity on behalf of her friends, she strove not to acquaint herself with the details of their enthusiasm, to speak of it, when necessary, as a stage which they would outgrow, or a species of mental illness from which they might recover. Indeed, she hoped that by ignoring it she could make this “phase” pass, and resented the unawareness of the Monteverdians which seemed, on its side, to take no account of her abstentions. “Why, that sounds kind of
religious
to me,” she would reply uncomfortably if obliged to listen to Katy’s translations of the Founder’s thought; so her own aunt had spoken, doubtfully shaking her head and laying down her sewing, when Susan brought up arguments in favor of racial equality—“Sounds kind of communistic …” Thus the purists’ persistence and the native shrewdness and precaution which made her look anxiously on ideas as something one could catch by contagion had kept her for some time from
thinking at all about political questions, which she left now to Taub, whom she considered her intellectual superior, though she disagreed with him sharply in everything that mattered to her most. To Katy, a natural proselytizer readily infected with enthusiasms, Susan’s unwillingness to change masters was a source of continual disappointment. That Susan could remain unmoved by a call so clearly heard by herself, drove her to a teacher’s despair, and her habit of incessant comparison led her at once to inquire whether Susan was not more admirable, for being less facile in feeling, than she was. Anything short of perfect communion depressed Katy, and Susan’s way of taking everything that she said literally, without the liberality that interprets and supplies feeling-tone, made her imagine herself misunderstood and discovered simultaneously; and it was true enough, as a matter of fact, that Susan did not greatly care for Katy, while giving her precisely her due.

Other letters besides Monteverdi’s began to come from Europe. The manifestos of the colony had apparently been circulating through the yet-unoccupied countries, and from all sorts of persons, mostly poor, middle-aged, and obscure, requests for information, for literature, and above all, for passage-money arrived. Leo Raphael, reading these, charmed by the strange locutions and the naïveté of the demands, began to conceive a vast plan for a peace-fleet, to be financed by the United States Government, that would carry away from Europe all those who rejected for
themselves a totalitarian way of life and who yet were unwilling to risk the terrible cost to humanity of another war for democracy. He saw a poetic vision of a continent left empty before the advancing invader—the silent factories, and houses, the anti-aircraft guns, the museums, waiting like a shell to frustrate the will of the victor, who would find on hand to receive him only those who welcomed his tyranny. This version of the scorched-earth policy had also, as he pointed out at a general meeting held on the Fourth of July in the dining room, the merit of practicality. It would be actually cheaper for the United States to send over empty ships to bring back the peace-loving passengers than to send, as it was doing, steel, planes, bombs, guns, to governments which were, in many cases, too timorous and unstable to use them, or to send wheat, corn, and fats to keep alive populations whose life-expectancy, clearly, was a matter of weeks or months. “The armaments we are now shipping will simply fall into the hands of the enemy. If we must feed democratic Europe, it is cheaper to do it here. If we must fight, we will do it here, also supposing that we are invaded.
They
ask us to divide the world with them in a policy that is called appeasement. Let us agree to do this, but only in a geographical sense. Let them keep the geography of their hemisphere and we will take the populations. Canada,” he continued, warming, “will clearly be willing to co-operate. Already in the last war, there was talk of moving the British Government to Ottawa. We will establish socialism,” he went on, as
the implications of his thought became fuller, and his dark eyes lit up with a fanatic love for the beautiful; he saw the American continent from Alaska to the Straits of Magellan, blue, white, golden, productive, inhabited by all the nations, each speaking its own tongue and cultivating its own gardens, the Italians in the California vineyards, the French in the moist valley of the St. Lawrence, the English on the ranches of Wyoming and in the councils of Washington and Ottawa, the Spaniards in Peru and Mexico. “Socialism,” he explained, “will be a necessity. The task cannot be accomplished without it. We will create an internal market in an economy of abundance. This will be the new imperialism, full production for peace.”

He drew a deep breath.

“This country,” he continued, more quietly, “has one tradition that is viable. It has been from the earliest times a haven of refuge from tyranny. The Puritans in New England, the Catholics in Maryland, the Irish peasants oppressed by the landlords, the victims of ’48, Russian Jews fleeing military service, the refugees from Mussolini and Hitler.” Harold Sidney coughed. “What is this, Leo, a Fourth of July speech?” he demanded with a self-conscious laugh. “Sssh,” put in Susan, peremptorily, “I want to hear what he has to say.”

“All our messianic wars,” Leo explained, realizing that the word
imperialism
and the citations from American history were having a misleading effect, “have been fiascoes. We have mistaken our role. We
cannot carry democracy abroad with military expeditions or food shipments. We can only receive it here, when it comes to us looking for entrance. America is ideally a harbor, a state of the utmost receptivity. It is not our role to lead, but to be open. America, I imagine, if this plan can be put into effect, will disappear, at least as we know it. America is only a vessel, waiting to be filled, a preparation for something that has not yet happened. That is what we all have been sensing in the air, ever since we were children, a restless, bemused expectancy of an event that will come to stay with us, like a visitor. I remember,” he went on, “those summer afternoons on a lake in New Jersey, with a still haze floating over everything and a phonograph playing somewhere, and a row boat drifting in the water, as if time itself were pausing, just on the edge of the incredible. I express myself very badly,” he interpolated, slipping into a more ordinary voice.

“Never mind your autobiography, Leo,” called Macdermott, laughing. “We get you. Go on. What do you propose?”

“That should be clear,” said Leo. “I propose a United States of Europe, to be constituted in the Western Hemisphere, with a system of joint government by all the member nations. A United States of Europe in Exile, to be made up, not of politicians, but of ordinary people and intellectuals. I leave the details to you,” he added, winking broadly, and sat down.