The Oasis (13 page)

“It’s silly,” Katy went on, resuming her ordinary demeanor, “to try to interest other people in this plan when we’ve done nothing for it ourselves. We have to begin with the pamphlet and reach as many readers as we can. Then …” she gestured vaguely, “we will see what can be done. I was just talking to Francis.” The young minister gave a nod of acknowledgment, slightly rising from his seat; he was extremely conscious of his holy orders and showed a great sensitivity to quotation, as if he were an authorized text. “He suggests that perhaps the next step would be to form an organization, something like the old CARE, to bring people here instead of sending them packages.”

“That is substantially correct,” said Francis, with a short clerical clearing of the throat. “Naturally, we would begin in a very small way. The advantage is that such a practical fund, by enlisting people’s charitable impulses, would expose them to our idea, and also lead them, before very long, to look for a way of financing it at the public expense.” He coughed, and the meeting, after a second of incomprehension, burst into laughter and applause. Francis’s sermonizing voice, nature’s gift, apparently, he played on for profane effects that seemed sometimes almost blasphemous; many a sardonic epigram uncoiled itself guilefully in his periods like the serpent in the garden of innocence. The more naïve Utopians hardly knew what to make of him; they looked to a leader before laughing at his witticisms as the unaccustomed churchgoer awaits the direction of the choir before venturing to rise for the anthem or seat himself for the sermon in his pew. “He tickles me,” confided Taub to his wife, illustrating this remark with a vast delighted wriggle and a poke in the ribs. His amazed admiration had known no bounds from the moment he formed the idea that the decorous young clergyman was an unbeliever of the deepest dye. Had he seen Francis in his room on his knees praying to be forgiven for levity, he would merely have given the young man credit for an artistry more consummate than that which he had already conceded him.

Francis’s suggestion, now, combining the Machiavellian with the humanitarian, made an immediate appeal to his fancy. He did not think it really practical; he
looked in fact upon the man of God’s sense of policy as a kind of hothouse produce of the ecclesiastical atmosphere, too rarefied for this world. Still, he saw no harm in supporting him, provisionally, at any rate. Ever since his break with the Movement, his imagination had been seeking a vision of some tremendous social change, involving the uprooting of millions, on which to disport itself. The irrigation of deserts, the leveling of mountains, the control of rain and snow, heat and humidity, and, above all, the remolding of the human material itself, the disruption of ancient patterns—such dreams of power and mastery, far more than its fraternal aspect, were what had attracted him to communism, and his disillusionment with the Movement had sprung largely from its concentration on narrowly nationalistic aims and its abandonment of an insurgent ideology. This imagination of his was too graphic for war to fill the bill for it; he groaned as he heard a fancied bomb land and shrank from the jet-projectile. Not since the opening of the Moscow subway had an event of large dimensions moved him to creative identification, and now, increasingly, as he observed the needle of the meeting swing slowly back to Leo, he felt himself more and more attracted by the very grandiosity of the plan. “Stranger things have happened,” he remarked with solemnity to Harold, and his mind, like a great derrick, began moving the peoples of the earth, out of their old folkways and into a new dynamic. “For this we would need atomic energy,” he declared softly, after a few moments of
calculation. “It is always so in history. The problem and the solution come at the same time.”

On this note of tentative willingness the meeting broke up. Joe Lockman, who had absented himself during the final discussion, appeared in the doorway to summon them for a fireworks display, which, through the offices of a novelty wholesaler in Quincy, he had been arranging for the past week. It had grown completely dark. The younger children were roused from their cots in an improvised dormitory; the older children were called from the lounge, where, with that peculiar lack of initiative characteristic of the dawn of life, they had been playing their eternal game of cards—everyone gathered on the lawn or on the deep verandah, which went nearly three-quarters of the way around the hotel and widened, facing the mountains, to form a kind of jutting deck. Into the limitless night the rockets and Roman candles were launched in a magical colored procession of fountains, sprays, constellations, arcs, spirals, lone brilliant stars cutting a great swath through the heavens and dropping uncompanioned into darkness. On the lawn, the huge maples could be seen outlined in the flashes of light, their gnarled, ancient, peaceable shapes assuming a baroque and terrible aspect. Joe, having hastily quitted his post at the urging of Haines and Jackson, was sketching on the verandah with the help of a pair of flashlights held stiffly before him by Susan in the attitude of an acolyte with tapers. Whistler’s
Nocturne
had inspired him to improve on it; he was attempting
to trace the myriad paths of the rockets as though to grasp the secret of movement, but depressed by the slowness of his pencil, he flung it down in despair. The air was cold and damp; some of the youngest children began to whimper; others were admonished by their mothers to pay attention to the show. The display itself began to fizzle out, like the promise of the rockets in the sky. The bursts of stars came more sparsely; the same types began to recur—the novelty wholesaler was only human and the poverty of his resources was soon manifest, particularly to the children, whose criticisms were hastily shushed. That sense of longing for the infinite, of regret, and a certain dispiritedness produced by all mechanical marvels, commenced to be generally felt; half-ashamedly, the colonists were wishing themselves in their warm, protected beds. Yet the last golden-white spray as it spent itself forlornly in the void evoked a sigh of disappointment. “I could have watched that for ever,” they assured Joe as they parted.

Taub woke up the next morning in a singularly good mood. A strawberry picnic was planned for noon in the high meadow. A holiday had been declared from the fields, and the company was to spend the morning in the woods picking the small wild strawberries, and then converge at twelve on the meadow, where they grew in the greatest abundance, and with the sun-warmed flavor of wine. A prize would be awarded to
the person with the fullest basket. The discovery of these little berries had been an event of the richest significance to Taub. He recalled having gathered such berries with his mother in the dark forests of the Carpathians, and his first instinctive reaction had been one of startled unbelief when one of the children had come running into the kitchen, where he was meditatively drying the dishes, with the news that there were strawberries in the woods. “Impossible!” he had exclaimed to Susan, but he had gone out to see for himself, and confronted with the tiny, half-ripe fruit, he had stood agog with the coincidence, turning a berry over and over doubtfully in his big fingers, like a jeweler appraising a diamond. The minuteness of the fruit and its rarity, together with the memory of himself, small and uniquely valued by the guardian presence of his mother, had struck him with awe and reverence. He felt his character soften and an unwonted tenderness invade him, as tactfully and even piously he wrapped the little fruit in his handkerchief to take home and show to his wife. A sense of restored continuity soothed his locative anxiety; Utopia appeared as the sequel to a story begun in his childhood, and the fact, which he slowly ascertained after many surreptitious woodland strolls, that the colony not only had these wild strawberries but had them in a greater plenitude than he had ever known in his homeland topped off nostalgic sentiment with the creamy self-satisfaction of the well-pleased entrepreneur.

The season being a tardy one, the fruit had reached
its peak on this Fourth of July weekend. It had not rained for some days, so that the kitchen garden needed no weeding, and the berries were in perfect condition. In the main kitchen, Katy and Eleanor Macdermott were frying great pans full of chicken, and Nelly Boardman, the illustrator, was preparing a freezer of vanilla ice cream for Haines and the young veteran to crank. Taub and Cynthia, with their basket, set off rather late to the forest, arms interlinked, and leaning slightly on one another, with an air of mutual solicitude, like a fond elderly couple who have supported life’s trials together. The strawberries had drawn them closer; for Cynthia, too, they held memories of a lost idyllic period when, during a summer at Fontainebleau as a young lady, she would eat
fraises des bois
on a Sunday in an upper dining room of Lapérouse and dream of the career ahead of her in the great world of fashion. The Taubs’ disparate reminiscences fructified each other and revived the romance between them—the consciousness of social difference which had attracted them to each other had become somewhat blurred by their years of association. Cynthia was estimating, more for her husband’s pleasure than her own, what a serving of these berries would cost at a fashionable restaurant today (presuming, of course, that one could get them), and Taub’s flat black eyes bulged naively at the figures she mentioned; an ejaculation of pain escaped him as if from the region of his pocket-book. Neither husband nor wife was a good picker; they bent arduously from the waist. A
sense of their joint dignity would not permit them to squat—and their eyes were too nearsighted to distinguish the round, serrated strawberry leaf from the pointed wild blackberry. Nevertheless, they were content, though the bottom of their basket was barely covered and Taub had begun to think that whatever price could be charged for them would result in a loss to the picker. Halfway through the morning they sat down to rest and idly listened for bird calls, in which Cynthia was instructing her husband. Thus it happened that they heard, quite close to them, the sound of an automobile motor.

This noise startled them both; they had no way of accounting for it. The cars belonging to the colonists were jacked up in a shed; once every fortnight an oil truck made its way down the rutted drive, but no other vehicles were expected, and the drive, in any case, was more than the distance of the meadow from the place in the pine-trees where they sat. They listened for some moments but did not hear it again, and they had almost come to the conclusion that perhaps they had been mistaken when they heard a man’s voice, speaking quite near them and in a gruff accent they did not recognize. With a quickening alarm that was not altogether rational, they struggled to their feet, and Taub, parting the underbrush, peered through into the meadow.

In a moment, with his finger to his lips, he beckoned to Cynthia to join him, and looking through the opening he indicated, she saw a strange trio, a man, a
woman, and a child. Just beyond them, in the meadow, was parked an old car, and, as Taub and Cynthia watched, the three got out pails, the man assigned stations to the others, and they began to pick, very rapidly, like experts who knew the terrain.

Will’s first impulse, and also his second, was to return to the big house for help. Cynthia dissented in an undertone, puckering her eyebrows disdainfully; there were times when her husband’s caution moved her to a just impatience. “Say something to them,” she urged, but Taub shook his head angrily, and a look of conjugal fury flashed from his narrowed eyes. “Then I will,” she announced, hoping to shame him into action, but Taub had already left her, and, seeing nothing else for it, being a precisian of her word, Cynthia stepped into the meadow, and addressed the strangers in her thinnest and politest voice. “I beg your pardon,” she said. The child looked briefly up, but the man and woman went on picking, without a sign of having heard her. “I beg your pardon,” she repeated more distinctly, but again no one responded and not knowing what to say further, her spine stiffening with terror, she drew back into the woods as noiselessly as possible, and as soon as the bushes closed behind her, trotted breathily, teetering on her high heels, back to the main house, where Will had only just preceded her.

Katy Norell, on the verandah, was questioning Taub’s story with a troubled face. Cynthia recounted what had happened to her, and Katy listened incredulously; Eleanor Macdermott came out from the
kitchen to lend a semi-official ear. “They couldn’t have heard you, Cynthia,” Katy declared with positiveness. “No one would behave that way.” Cynthia tossed her curled head and made a
moue
of annoyance. “Go up and look for yourself.” “Better wait for the men,” counseled Eleanor Macdermott, and, as if to dismiss the matter, she moved to the door with a shrug. Katy put out a hand to detain her. “Eleanor,” she begged, thoroughly perturbed, “hadn’t we better do
something
?” Eleanor shrugged again. “Go up and look if you want to,” she threw out curtly, evading Katy’s hand. “Does it really make so much difference to you?” she added, half in curiosity, half in rebuke. Katy flushed. As a matter of fact, she had been mentally counting the strawberries that could be picked while the group on the porch delayed; her imperious love of pleasure had attached itself to the day’s outing, and the invaders in the meadow seemed to her to have been sent by some malign destiny expressly to cross her will. Recovering from her confusion, she saw the Taubs examining her with a certain morose satisfaction, as though to say, Now it has happened and you see where Utopian ideas get you. This complacent scrutiny put her at once on her mettle. The challenge of the pickers would have to be met and answered. And though she longed for her husband or Haines or Macdougal to come and meet it for her, her very isolation, the unfriendliness of her three companions became, as she inwardly debated, a greater incentive to action. Nervous and shy with strangers, fearful of disapproval, unsure of her own
motives, she was driven by these qualities to assume an attitude of confidence that would put the others to shame. “I’m going up and speak to them,” she announced, just as she had decided that it was wiser not to do so—confronted with any difficult problem, Katy always made two decisions; the second remedying the moral weakness that was disclosed to her by the first. No one tried to deter her, and she set off alone up the hill, hoping to hear behind her the voice of a friendly colonist and assuring herself that the unbroken stillness meant that the pickers were gone.