Shadows

1

Making money was a habit with Bernard Culver and he knew it. When he was a young man he contrived to make people take him for granted and he worked hard and became prominent before they really knew he had arrived. Today they still take him for granted even while they do what he tells them.

All his life Culver has preferred the darkness to the light, and I believe that some teacher of his, or someone he admired when he was a boy, must have shown him that a commonplace man can become prominent only if no one sees clearly what he intends to do. So Culver’s life has been a technique of negation and the fruits of it have been dividends so large he can hardly estimate them. At present he owns three rolling mills in Pittsburgh, controls two banks and is president of the Oil and Service Company of America. The country has had many more brilliant millionaires than Culver, but no sounder ones, and when he tells people that his success is the result of work and habit he means exactly what he says. He is not a remarkable man or even an interesting one, but something rarer. He is a successful man.

A few years ago I was with Culver in his office in Pittsburgh. It was a winter evening and the lights of the city made the thick darkness look like fog, eastward over the steel-works a ruddy glare came and went as the slag was poured, and I seemed to feel the whole district throb like a stationary engine and had a vision of monsters opening and closing furnace doors. Culver, his large face grave and unreadable, his suit dark and inconspicuous, his shirt white, sat quietly upright, hands folded in front of him. The window was open and a slow sound filled the room. It was ominous and insistent, like the breathing of an animal you have never seen but know to be terrifying, an atavistic monster blinded by the light. And the robot figures of Culver’s workmen surged through my brain, I had been seeing so many of them lately, and the face of each one of them was fixed in a senseless, efficient stare at whatever he was doing. It was like walking in a bad dream to be in this maze of figures and lathes and bolts and engines, for they kept revolving. I was tired and they revolved smoothly through my brain like ball-bearings relative to the turning rod until I seemed to revolve myself and the slag-illumined acrid sky to revolve too. Culver, who had not spoken for a long time, suddenly said, “I wish Mom were living. She’d have liked to see me here.”

Perhaps that remark gave away his secret. Perhaps I never was able to understand him at all in those days when he seemed as impersonal as the power he had accumulated, but this was certainly the most personal remark I ever heard him make. All his life he had possessed this gift of eloquent silence, this faculty for being neither in the way nor out of the way, that made more talkative people respect him and attribute his habitual silence to the natural reserve of an able man. None of the people who paraded before his desk waiting for orders suspected that he wanted always to see himself in the mirror of another person. To them he seemed to live for one thing only, to organize men and things. Yet this was the evening of the day on which he had been made president of the oil company, the day of his supreme elevation.

To those who knew that Culver was married to his work it was a mystery why he had a wife at all, much less a woman like Arina. She was a Russian, and during all the years I knew her the revolution in her own land had less reality for her than the novels of Tolstoy and Turgenev. One of her grandfathers had been of noble blood and had earned a barbaric reputation in his own neighbourhood, but her immediate family was discretely bourgeois and saturated with the liberal-romantic literature of the day. Arina, who came from a small mining town not far from Kharkov, grew up thinking of herself as a character in fiction; indeed she looked at everyone through such a thick haze of literary references that when Bernard Culver appeared in the town she thought of him as some giant of fiction and took his inability to express himself in any language as a proof of silent strength in action.

Culver went to Russia at the age of thirty-three. He had been sent out by a Pittsburgh concern to install some mining equipment and it took him several months to do it to his satisfaction. It was the first time he had ever been outside the United States, and the violent change shook his concentration for about the only time in his life. His card-indexes were too small to hold room for the contrasts he saw here. The poverty of the masses, squalor such as he had never imagined existed among white people, began to gnaw at his mind. For Culver had been born poor, and as he had grown up in a family which had always been on the fringe of destitution he hated the thought of poverty simply because he never had been able to conquer the irrational fear that he might one day become poor again himself.

But after a time the scene in this Russian mining town excited him. He saw America as a thing apart, something quite unique, and became proud of himself, a carpenter’s son who had once been to the high-school in Columbus, Ohio, but who now was known as The American. Here he was a sort of magician, and no one took him for granted.

Natural phenomena had never been observed by Culver back in the U.S.A., but when winter came in here and the drifts piled up in the long nights and the steppe beyond the town was like a great white ocean in the moonlight, he felt a sore place in his liver and said to himself, if the fellows back home could picture me here, just for a minute! After a day’s work he liked to visit the taverns and listen to the talk he could not understand, and it was wonderful to feel his own solidity and sureness among the loose-limbed, easy-moving Russians, the multitudinous hordes of this country who seemed as dumb as the shaggy ponies he had seen on their plains.

Yet he was lonely. The Russians could not work at the pace of Americans and he always seemed to have an excess of time on his hands. As he stood or sat around with little to do the physical sense he had acquired of the country made him uneasy with a strange, pervading excitement. He could not disregard or forget about these thousands of miles of rolling land filled with mute peasants, some of them starving, many of them diseased, all of them so silent they could sit without movement or speech for hours on end. And he had also seen a little of the other side of the picture, the great ladies and gentlemen who lived apart with each other, the men inefficient but barbarically splendid and the women easy, their thighs moving with slumberous adequacy, indifferent, unaware of his rigid American competence.

That Culver and Arina should have met during this winter in Russia was inevitable, for she was the daughter of the colliery doctor and one of the few local inhabitants who could speak English. She had one of those inordinately small figures which nevertheless are perfectly formed and smoothly curved, and by suggesting a combination of sensuality and helplessness, attract certain men. Culver spent much of his time in her father’s house, and the strangeness of the environment, her childish reverence for him as the man of action, ultimately wore down his caution. He finally asked her to marry him and the wedding took place the day after his work in the mine was finished.

How long it was before Arina realized the type of life she had chosen I do not know. They left for Moscow immediately, travelled without a break to London, spent a day there sightseeing, then sailed for New York on a ship out of Liverpool. The crowds of the cities astonished her; coming from a land of peasants she was half-stunned by the modern world, and in childish obstinacy rebelled against it. Then the voyage was rough and made her very sick, so that when she caught sight of the granite boulders and the solitary spruce and fir lining the shores as the ship neared Halifax harbour she was strangely comforted. It was doubtless the memory of this which made her return to Nova Scotia later.

Culver, talking business with an older American in the smoke-room, feeling comfortable and sure of himself once again, took no interest in Canada at all, but when they reached New York two days later he was nervous and quietly excited, and pointed out to her the tall buildings and the swarms of immigrants crowding out of other ships onto the docks like slaves in a market.

“Take a look at them!” he said exuberantly. “They don’t know it but they’re power. Cheap labour and the best there is. But it takes the old U.S.A. to know how to use them!”

“I think some of them are Russians,” she said quietly.

“Sure,” said Culver, “why not?”

He led her down the gang-plank into the roar of the dock, pushed his way firmly and indifferently through the crowds of porters and passengers and officials, his bride slightly behind him and to his left, his career in his pocket.

Arina, following him, saw little except the square, shaven back of his neck. Perhaps she was overcome by all this confusion and strangeness; perhaps she hardly knew what was passing through her mind; perhaps the memory of her wedding night was still paramount. Her mind persisted for many years afterwards to return to the scene in the Metropole Hotel in Moscow when she—no doubt theatrically but surely with sincerity—had offered herself, and Culver, six minutes later, his mind seeing among other objects the fire-escape of the Columbus high-school, had consummated the marriage.

As a result of this union I was born.

2

When I was a child, Arina and I lived in a house in the Pennsylvania mountains near Greensburg and I rarely saw my father. He was so busy with his work that he came to us only on an occasional weekend and was usually silent for the time he stayed. At first he was just a large object to me, but when I was nine years old I once saw him on his knees to Arina and I saw drops of sweat on his forehead and his knuckles white on the backs of his hands and his fingers straining into her body. He had already grown rich by then, and the place in the mountains had become enlarged and a conservatory had been added. They were sitting here when I came in from the lawn.

I heard him say that he had given her all these things and expected something in return. Arina wore a face like a mask with sharp lines drawn about the mouth. She just sat and looked and said nothing. So Culver got to his feet and tried to drag her from the room. She saw me as I reached the door, broke clear of him and ran across the conservatory floor and threw her arms about me, and Culver coming after her pushed me away so hard I fell and struck my head. It was the only violent thing I ever saw him do.

“You’re just like your mother,” I heard him say. “You’re both a couple of lazy Russians.”

I was lying on my back and I suppose I was staring at him.

“Why don’t you learn to do something?” he said as he left us. “And that goes for both of you.”

It was not always this way when he and Arina were together; sometimes they tolerated each other and would sit in the same room for hours on end in a cold silence. Sometimes she went to Pittsburgh to be seen with him in public and once they made a short trip together. But as time passed Arina and I became more like hermits and he came less frequently to see us. I know now that she stayed in the house because she had no other place to go; because—and this was particularly true after the Russian revolution—she was so chronically bewildered that she knew nothing else to do.

For my part the life was pleasant enough. I had all the pets I wanted and the gardeners were friendly and there were always things to watch and learn about in the country. Also we had neighbours who became close friends, and one of them whose property adjoined ours, a shambling old man called Edward Eisenhardt, was the nearest approach to a father I ever had.

At first I used to see him working in his garden on the other side of the fence and he used to speak to me the way old men talk to children. Then one afternoon as I came into our living room I saw him with my mother, sprawling on the base of his spine in Culver’s armchair, a tea-cup looking grotesquely small in his enormous hands.

“That’s a fine boy you’ve got,” he was saying. “But what I’d like to know is what you do with him around here?”

“He learns with me?”

“Speaks Russian too?”

“I teach him both Russian and English. His father disapproves of him knowing Russian.”

“Yeah, I guess he would.” The idea seemed to amuse him. “Why don’t you send him over to my place sometimes? There’s a boy over there he can play around with.”

“You have a son too?”

“Nicholas, I call him. Eisenhardt’s a pretty bad name, but Nicholas Eisenhardt now, that sounds like something. The world, Mrs. Culver, takes you at what you sound and look like. There’s nothing like giving a kid all the breaks at the start. He’ll need them.”

“David has no real friends here … except the gardeners, that is. He likes being with them. He understands their work, too.”

At this moment they noticed me and stopped talking. Eisenhardt got up and put his cup down, came over and picked me up in his huge hands as though I weighed nothing. “I guess you and I are going to be friends,” he said, and set me down again on the sofa. “You better come along over to our place tomorrow and meet Nicholas.”

“I’d like that,” I said.

Arina seemed about to protest; she was always afraid that someone or something would take me away from her, but Eisenhardt interrupted her.

“Quite a kid, my young Nicholas, he’s quite an experiment. You know, he’s not really my son at all. I picked him out of the gutter in New York six years ago. Of course, I should have made fuller enquiries before bringing him home, but I guessed I could look after him better than whoever had had him before. Quite an experiment. I haven’t figured out yet what he is. He’s not dumb enough to be a Swede, he’s not dark enough to be a Wop. Maybe he’s just an American after all, whatever that is.”

My mother seemed bewildered by the man. “You’re not like most men I meet here,” she said with apprehension.

“I should hope not!” He laughed loudly, as though consciously playing a character part which pleased him. “I worked like a slave, quite a few years, to roll up a big enough stake to retire and be myself. And now I’ve got it … Madam, I’m going to go right on being myself till the day I die!”

During the rest of this conversation, which continued for several hours after I came into the room and was formally introduced, my father was not mentioned. In fact, during the years that followed, Eisenhardt rarely mentioned Culver unless someone asked him to do so, but he very quickly began doing things for me a normal father would have done and he became the only close friend Arina had. She resented the way he managed things for us but always let him have his way. He knew people, liked them and was skilful at managing them. What I should have been like without him and Nicholas I do not know.

Nicholas and I played together and as we grew older went to the Adirondacks each winter holidays for the skiing. If Culver knew anything of the part the Eisenhardts played in our lives he took it for granted as he seemed to take everything else connected with Arina and me for granted. But there was one thing he never even faintly realized. Although in the back of his mind it was his intention that I one day should take over the management of his companies, it never occurred to him that this slow, easy rhythm of country life was steadily unfitting me for such an existence.

Meanwhile, the more Arina buried herself away from the active world, the more profoundly she came to mistake her own frustrations and daydreams for an inner spiritual life of her own, and this coincided with the progress Culver was making towards power. All the time I was growing up, the motions of my father towards his environment were directed to one end, and were the more effective because he was at best semi-conscious of the meaning of his own life. When he was forty he had risen to the top of his own industry. His diffidence disappeared now that he was able to give orders and introduce the improvements which were a part of the general process in which he operated and which he thought he controlled. By the time I was ten years old he had acquired complete ownership of the rolling mill, and during the war profits came in so fast he rarely had time to estimate his own assets.

Culver was one of the few businessmen at that time who did not shout about patriotism. Indeed, he was usually a quiet man, liking authority more than show. But somehow the war made him confident. He knew he was important to the country, and I believe for the first time in his life he lost the fear of being poor. When this fear went out he became formidable, because confidence in the rightness of his own wishes and his own decisions took its place. He rarely saw Arina now.

The surge was sweeping him with it. In 1919 he cut wages in order to obtain money for another project and the I.W.W. organized a strike at the rolling mill. One day he and some newspapermen stood at the windows of his large private office overlooking the yard, watching men pour out of his gates cursing him. One reporter observed how strangely like scraps of used metal his workers appeared. Culver said nothing. There was a cordon of police at the gates and the workmen collected outside, shouting in barbarous foreign accents and occasionally tempting the police by throwing stones at the scabs who marched in behind the cordon.

“If a striker shows his head inside here,” Culver told the police captain standing next him watching the scene, “give orders to hit it.”

“Just another guy that’s heard about Carnegie,” a reporter muttered audibly.

I do not know what instinct Culver possessed for handling men. Certainly he could not understand them as individuals, and I know he never realized that he was not dealing with men at all, but with the mass, and that this mass was unconsciously violated by the machines he gave them to work with, even while some of them loved machinery. I suppose he had an instinct for his business; certainly I never made the mistake of judging his capacity by his words. Yet Bernard Culver only thought he was a man of action. He never changed anything in his life, but merely trimmed his ship to various eddies in the general current that bore him. He accepted everything without question; everything, that is, except the great underlying fact that he was a part and aspect of a stream that had started before he was born. When workers struck for better conditions he never stopped to ask questions. He knew that the police were too strong for them and that public opinion was too strong; even that the men, in the long run, wanted to take his orders. Subtly, he sensed that he was giving America what it wanted. On the occasion of that first strike he actually said as much to a reporter when they finally bullied him into talking. The remark was used the next morning in a New York journal.

So it happened that after this strike was broken and the men went back to work, Culver continued with his improvements until the machines could work without him and salaried experts guided them all. Then he went to Oklahoma and put some of his money in oil. A new field had been discovered and when he had obtained the controlling interest in it he moved his headquarters to Oklahoma and stayed until he had this industry running as efficiently as his rolling mills. What he heard now was the clacking of derricks instead of the screaming of hot lathes. And there was a strike in the oil fields too and Culver broke it. Some peculiar violence came over him on that occasion, for he went down to the refinery and talked to the men.

“I’m giving you what you want and you know it. What are you kicking about? You’re getting good money and what more do you want? You can’t all be boss.”

It was night and the strikers were roaming like a disbanded army among the derricks. Culver had hoped he might avert this strike, for the price of scabs was high that year. But he also wanted to break the union and was ready to pay two hundred thousand to do so. The union was fighting back. A hundred yards away a communist was haranguing the men.

The papers appeared next day with a picture of the scene. In the glare of the exploding flashlight bulbs the strikers looked like an army sacking a city. In the corner of one picture you could see the police smashing a way through the crowd. After Culver had broken that strike he discovered that other industrialists regarded him as a great man, at once a threat and a brother.

At last he became an operator, and in the Babbitt age the money came in faster. He grew crafty. And strangely, it was only then that people began to find him arbitrary and difficult to get along with. He was richer than he had ever hoped to be and more powerful. He looked harder; he had every reason to be confident, yet he was worried most of the time. Sometimes he felt that he had some obscure illness, and then he spent a lot of money on doctors. They could find no mechanical derangement in his body, not even the beginnings of high blood pressure.

It was in 1928 that he reached the summit of his power, and at the time I saw him in his office in Pittsburgh he had just returned from a tour of all his possessions. It was then that I first heard him say, “I wish Mom were alive. She would have liked to see me here.”

I have met other men like him and at bottom they all seemed similar. I couldn’t feel that he was any more to me personally than the others. They reminded me of mahogany tables and cigar smoke and chromium, and from what I saw of them there was no more difference man to man among them than there was among the robots they made of their workers. I do not mean that they failed to understand; merely that they acted as though they did not. Knowledge for its own sake never meant a thing to Culver, and to judge him by what he said was absurd. That was what the reformers did, and it was for this reason that they underrated him.

3

One afternoon when I was fourteen years old Culver came down to the country, saying that it was high time he and I had a real talk together, and I remember that one of his first questions was why I seemed frightened of him. He said that he had only my interests at heart and that I must remember that I was an American and not a Russian and should discover how right he was when I got older. His few talks with me had never been a success. He always seemed like a stranger and he always made me feel ashamed of myself. Arina knew what he wanted and grew hysterical and Culver just looked at her contemptuously and took me out to the car to be away from her.

“It’s about time you grew up,” he said. “Mind you, I’m not saying it’s your fault, but you’re getting mighty queer ideas into your head. You’re going to find out the world isn’t run the way they say it is in books. You’re going to find it out soon enough anyway and what I say is, the sooner the better.”

I sat still beside him, feeling uncomfortable.

“You want to go to high school, don’t you?” he said. “When you’re finished at this private school you’re going to now?”

“I suppose so. I don’t know much about it, of course. I like the school where I am.”

“Yes … well, all right then. That’s settled. I didn’t have any of your advantages when I was your age and from what I see it looks like you were taking everything you’ve got for granted. Knocking around with less fortunate fellows won’t do you any harm. In September you can start in at the biggest high school in Pittsburgh.”

He then went into a monologue about how necessary it was for me to learn how to manage men and he talked with some obscurity about the important position I should occupy when I became older. He ended by saying that the only reason he worked so hard was to make a place for me later on. Then he drove back to the house, deposited me, and returned to Pittsburgh.

When Eisenhardt strolled over later in the evening I repeated to him most of what my father had said. The old man simply laughed and said that this assured him; he knew now why Culver was successful.

“Why?” Arina said. “You know he never thinks of David. He just wants to get him away from me, that’s all.”

“Now, now!” Eisenhardt said, and I could tell how serious he was underneath his words. “Why not look at things as they are, not as you want them to be?”

“Him!” Somehow Arina’s accent made her sound coarse when she was angry. “He never thinks of anybody.”

Eisenhardt put one of his huge fingers on her knee and tapped it. “Nobody’s arguing. I’m just trying to say that sometimes he really believes he thinks about both of you. He works hard all the time. You don’t know what hard work is, Arina.”

“Then you think that David should …”

He opened his mouth as though to make a loud outburst, closed it again and finally said quietly, “I’ll miss him too, if he goes away. But don’t forget, the kid’s an American. He’s got to go to school no matter what you want. It’s the law of the country, for that matter. And I guess that Pittsburgh school won’t be any worse than one of those fancy places in the east. When he graduates I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you all a real party, wine and everything, I’ll …”

“What good will that do us now?”

“Well” … he grinned widely … “None … But David’s got to get used to the world where his father’s important, whether you like it or not.”

“But it’s an awful world!” She looked at him as though he had betrayed her. “I suppose all the time you’ve been admiring it …”

“Arina, a man doesn’t admire a set of facts. A man doesn’t admire the pyramids. He doesn’t admire science. But if he’s smart he recognizes that these things exist.”

“And I thought all this time you were different from the others. You’re as bad as he is. You think …”

He lost patience with her: “What do you know what I think? What I think isn’t printable. Even if all our civilization amounts to is inventing ways of getting quicker each year from New York to Chicago and shifting big objects from one place to another, I guess it’s what we were born to. The trouble is, you’ve never accepted it. And something more: here in America a man’s got to succeed. You can only sneer at money after you’ve made it.”

“But I’ll never let David be like his father,” she said, “never, never!”

“You needn’t worry about that,” he said, chuckling at the idea. Then: “But don’t be a big enough fool to try and buck Culver. You can’t get away with it. He’s got where he is for a damn good reason. He’s got there because he gives them what they want, and gives it quicker and bigger and better. They may hate him, but they all do what he says fast enough. They didn’t like Rockefeller, but they all came into the last round-up before he was finished with them.”

Arina tried to say something about Russia, but he cut her short.

“Now then,” he said, “that sort of talk don’t get us anywhere. In Russia none of your friends have anything anymore and you know it. Just take a look at it over there if you want to blame everything on America. We may be bad, but over in Europe it’s really tough.”

“But there’s no Russia now. There is Revolution, that’s all.”

He looked at her with his bushy eyebrows raised high. For once her naiveté really surprised him. “You bet there is,” he said.

And so, at the beginning of the autumn, we moved into an apartment in Pittsburgh and I began going to high school. Part of its territory took in a tough section, and it was a bad school. I do not mean that I ever was sorry I was there or wanted some finishing school instead, but I do know that this school was not good, and because I was an outsider I saw and felt the worst of it. But this is of no importance. High schools are as standardized as Fords and without them America could hardly be as she is.

Now in this autumn the leaves turned on the Pennsylvania mountains and fell, and afterwards white hairs were visible on the backs of rabbits; the woods grew widely silent and on still mornings people came into their gardens and found russet chrysanthemums drooping, the stalks and petals crusted with a delicate dust of frost, and the ground brittle at the surface from the night’s cold. The land could be felt cooling towards winter.

But in Pittsburgh the motion of my life changed and the old rhythm of the countryside never came back, except sporadically, with a singular poignancy that rendered its acceptance difficult. Always after this I went out into the country like an exile who goes back to his home for a short visit after many years, for the metallic, confused rhythm of the big town beat steadily about, and I made no sense of it. It was years before I did. Those three years remain a jumble in which I grew rapidly taller and learned to think myself peculiar.

The smell of stale sweat as the flag was saluted every morning and right arms were raised uniformly, heads slightly bent, elbows at right angles to the floor; the girls, their breasts perceptibly heightening term by term; the stench of the showers in the Y.M.C.A. swimming pools; the close, sweet reek of humanity, the pressing against one of gallons of moving blood in a crowd on trolley cars, at football games and on the streets, and the slowly growing slowly gnawing itch to know not of books or flowers or animals, but of people, of how they felt, how they felt about themselves, how they felt about me. This, and Chuck Considine rolling up his sleeves and eyeballs and shouting, close your traps, who’s running this fight, me or you; and the peculiar violence of the pain as he beat me up, myself knowing nothing of what to do or how to defend myself, seeing it all from a distance as though I were a spectator being beaten up by this Chuck Considine, the tough Shanty-Irish kid, the son of one of my father’s workmen, going on with it because I knew, somehow, that after he was through the others would leave me alone. This, and the quick, unthinking rush to the crowd, the longing of everyone to submerge in the mass, then the convulsion, the fight to breathe, the pediculous final kick of the atom before he disappeared and became a unit in the new man of which he was a part, the mass-man that thought nothing, felt nothing, understood nothing, yet was more powerful than all the thought, feeling and understanding that ever existed in the whole world, the Man I never was a part of, whose blood had beaten placidly through Culver’s brain for many years.

And if I came out of these three years more consciously apart and alone than I had been before, I can say that my father was right in at least this one supposition: that I would come out different, no longer feeling close to Arina, not even when she and I were constantly alone together in the same rooms.

Meanwhile the city was working on Arina, not changing her, but making her hate America more and more. One night, at the end of my second year in school, she said there was only one place in North America where she thought she could be happy.

“Where might that be?” I asked without looking up from my textbooks.

“A place called, I think, Nova Scotia. When I first came from Russia, when I came on the ship with him, I was very lonely. For days there was nothing but sea … except on a spring morning, we came into a harbour. I could smell pine trees and salt water … even there were boulders the size of houses along the shores. When I was a girl in Russia I read about the Baltic. This place was like that. Do you think if we went up there we might be happy?”

“But Nova Scotia—that’s English, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps. I don’t remember. If it is, these people we do not like will not be there, perhaps.”

So when school was over for that year we went to Nova Scotia and lived in a cottage on St. Margaret’s Bay, about thirty miles from Halifax, and later Eisenhardt came with Nicholas and took a cottage on a small island near our part of the shore. There were hardly any tourists and we were almost alone. It is strange to think that Nicholas was a freshman in Yale then, it seems so long ago. I never felt any difference in age between us but in a sense we were not really intimate in those days. He was big and serious and good at games and even then he felt that he ought to become something remarkable. We took each other for granted, and I suppose he was the only man I have ever taken for granted.

That summer was a good one. There was a Canadian painter who lived near us, and he gave me my first lessons in watercolour. I liked to try to paint the native flowers as they lived and moved in the wind, and I felt wonderful when he told me I had real talent. I came away from Nova Scotia dreading the school and hating the idea of living in Pittsburgh, but I had learned one thing that constantly excited me. I knew that if I worked at it I could learn to paint.

4

A few days after I was graduated from high school my mother closed her apartment in Pittsburgh and we returned to the country, where we found Eisenhardt waiting for us with an invitation to the dinner he had promised three years before. Nicholas had just returned from his first year at Yale, looking solid and very serious as though he had much on his mind. He was silent throughout the dinner, which the old man handled so skilfully that Arina became more animated than I had ever seen her. It was one of those perfect nights we get sometimes in the Pennsylvania hills, warm and windless, the landscape flooded with moonlight, and as I sat there at the table feeling the wine, the first I had ever drunk, warm and smooth inside, the whole moment seemed to hang as though suspended by a charm, and I had a feeling that when it was broken, nothing afterwards would be quite the same. Finally I remember hearing Nicholas’s voice coming as though from a distance.

“What are you going to do now—go on to college?”

Before I could answer Arina said sharply, “no, he’s not!”

Eisenhardt’s bulk stirred uneasily in his chair and he held up his wine glass, examining its colour reflectively.

“You know,” he said, “I’m not what you’d call a man who goes in for formality, but I guess we don’t have these rituals for nothing. I kind of figured this little dinner world be a sort of ritual. Now I don’t want it broken by talk of what’s going to happen six months from now. Arina, you should be ashamed of yourself.”

“But—”

“Can taking thought add one cubit to the stature? No, Arina, there’s a time for all things.”

But my mother could never leave any subject connected with myself alone, and continued to protest against the idea of my going to college until finally Eisenhardt rose from the table and nodded to Nicholas, who strolled out through the open French windows onto the terrace. I followed him.

“I guess I upset your mother and she upset Dad,” Nicholas said gloomily. “Dad’s queer about some things, isn’t he?”

“He’s different.”

Nicholas nodded. “He’s a great man, even though I can’t see eye to eye with him. He leaves me alone, and I guess you know that’s a lot. I’d do anything for him.”

Looking back through the window I could see that Eisenhardt and Arina were deep in talk; or rather, that she was talking fast while he leaned sprawling back in his chair and said little, his hand shielding his eyes as though he were very tired. I followed Nicholas out into the garden and soon I was listening to him, feeling little meaning in his words, yet being enormously impressed because he, a friend of mine, was talking like a grown man. He was clumsily trying to pick the scab off his environment and was irritating himself into that strange state of mental discomfort which never left him as long as I knew him. He excited me. And the night in itself was exciting, too, being so tranquil that the sky seemed no part of the organism of the earth at all, but one of those stainless seas Shelley described in which all ships and lands have been sunk.

“Dad has a queer way with him of making you understand things,” Nicholas said. “He’s lived and seen such a lot. In New Haven I used to walk around the factory districts. I wonder what he thinks about things like that?”

I said nothing. He began to walk down the drive to the road and I followed. Eisenhardt’s place was about a tenth the size of ours; he had a small vegetable garden and a flower garden which he tended himself. Nicholas did not look in any way like him. He was big enough, and his figure was somewhat stiff, but he was blonde and his features were fine and lean. Uncle Edward’s face sprawled and looked battered, but when you noticed him closely you knew that not all the battering in the world would ever knock out his fleshy heartiness. The old man was ponderous as some animals are, belying their alertness, but Nicholas was leanly serious and his mind ran on a single track.

“Have you ever stopped to wonder why Dad retired so soon?” Nicholas said. “Ever since I can remember he’s lived out here. Of course he studies and reads a lot. You’d be surprised how much he reads. Still, I can’t see why he doesn’t want to do more.”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“I have. He never says anything much, though. Besides, I think I know why.”

“Why?” It felt strange to be talking about him like this. “I never thought there was anything queer about it,” I said.

Nicholas had his hands in his pockets and was walking slowly, kicking at small stones that stood out sharply on the road in the moonlight.

“You know he never talks at all about himself,” he went on. “But I guess the reason he dropped out was that it didn’t seem worthwhile.” Nicholas suddenly sounded angry. “And by Christ, neither it is! I’ve seen how the poor live in these factory towns and I think I’m finding out who makes them live that way too—and what makes them. I’m going to do something about it when I get out of school. Going to try to, anyhow.”

That night I thought he was courageous and very mature. We stood watching the process of light and shadow moving on hills far away and could see the lights of cars following each other half a mile off on the highway. “It’s good to be out here again,” I said.

“Yes. You’re right, it’s fine to be here. You don’t see your father spending much of his time here though, do you? Or letting the people that work for him spend time here either.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“You’ll see fast enough.” He stopped and grinned sheepishly. “I suppose I’ve got no right butting in on your business, Dave, but hell, we used to hang around together. Dad tells me you’ve been painting a lot. I don’t know much about it, but I’d like to see what you’ve done.”

Before I could answer he went on talking, saying that as far as he could make out the older a man got in America these days the lousier he got. He supposed it was the same anywhere, but somehow his father did not seem a yes-man like the rest and he was very certain he was not going to be one himself. I could tell that his generalizations were all based on some experience of his own at Yale, but he never told me what it was.

And it was on this same night that I discovered and understood for the first time clearly that it would not be possible for me to live much longer with Arina.

We found Eisenhardt still sitting in his chair with his chin up and his throat in shadow, looking like a battered old Rembrandt looming out of a dark canvas. “Be quiet, Arina!” I heard him say as we entered, and I gathered that we had come on the end of a conversation.

He rose slowly when he saw us. “Well, David, your mother and I have been talking. As usual, we’ve managed to disagree. She’s tired, so you’d better take her home.”

Arina looked several years older than she had at the beginning of the evening, and when we drove home in the car she was silent.

“Are you all right, Mother?”

“Yes,” she said after a while.

As we reached our own door and I was turning the car toward the garage she suddenly spoke. “Drive back. I forgot something.”

“Won’t Uncle Edward be in bed by the time we get there? He looked pretty tired when we left.”

“Never mind. Drive back anyway. You can wait in the car while I speak to him.”

I did what she asked. When we reached the house I saw that the reading lamp in the library was still on, as well as a light in Nicholas’s bedroom. Arina left me quickly and went into the house without knocking. Looking across the lawn into the open window of the library I could see a shadow suddenly plunge to the ceiling as Eisenhardt rose from his chair. I began to walk slowly back and forth in front of the house, feeling warm inside, feeling in the warm night air the way a man can never feel when he gets over his twenty-first birthday. The air seemed not so much to drift past as to rock like water in a vessel and through a gap in the trees I could see the exquisite line of the nearest hill where it bulged up against the pallid surface of the moonlit sky. I found myself thinking of girls, like ghosts out of Erebus, only half seen. Perhaps this was natural and would have come anyway; perhaps it derived from the Odyssey which I had just begun to read. Walking alone on the wet grass that night I was forgetting Arina, but suddenly I heard her voice saying loudly, “You don’t dare say that to him! You don’t dare!”

“For God’s sake!” Eisenhardt’s voice was quieter, but they must have moved closer to the windows. “Pipe down, please.”

She went on more quietly, but still so that I could hear her words. “You’re the only man he’ll ever listen to. His father’s coming out tomorrow. It’s now or never. His father wants him to go to Princeton. He always wants to take him away from me. Look at that high school! I tell you, I can’t stand any more of it!” Her voice took on the strange Russian coarseness as she became more excited.

“The high school didn’t do him any harm, did it?”

“It’s changed him. He’s not anymore the same to me.”

“Well—do we have to go over this again? If David speaks to me I’ll tell him what I think. I know Princeton may not be so hot, but what the hell? Maybe he wants to go. How do you know?”

“He wants only to paint,” she said tensely, “and you know it.”

“That’s a tough business. How do you know he’s good enough?”

“You know he’s good enough. You can say that … !”

“Now Arina—” His voice became still quieter. “I don’t know a damn thing about painting, but I do know this. I never heard tell of any kid of seventeen that became a great painter inside of a year. And David’s got to be mighty good if he’s going to offset being his father’s son. I don’t mean he’s got to be competent. I mean he’s got to have all that it takes.” Then his voice became deeper and more kindly. “Now Arina, his father’ll leave him alone if he does go to Princeton, won’t he?”

“Why can’t he go to Paris and study art? He and I could go together.”

“How would you pay for it? Culver won’t give him the money.”

“You think … do you mean he’d not give David money?”

“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

“I have five thousand dollars of my own. We could use that.”

Eisenhardt laughed loudly. “For how long? At your rate, I’d say less than six months the way you spend money. Listen—I think a lot of David. Maybe he’s going to be a great American painter. But you needn’t try to kid yourself that he’ll arrive in two years. If they even begin to notice him by the time he’s thirty-five, he’ll be lucky.”

I walked farther away from the house feeling frightened and uncomfortable. I kept repeating to myself, by the time I’m thirty-five, by the time I’m thirty-five, that’s eighteen years, that’s longer than I’ve lived. I tried to think of pictures I might paint, but what came to my mind was nothing of my own creating, only a melange of ideas from the masters: Rembrandt’s plasticity, Cezanne’s mathematical-like draughtsmanship, the haunting simplicity of Ryder. Suddenly I had an image of a statue by Mestrovic I had seen not long before.

Arina emerged from the house suddenly with her head half-hidden in the fur collar of her coat, her hair still looking black in the darkness. Even in the daylight one hardly noticed how grey she had become. We stepped into the car and drove home once more without talking.

“Is anything the matter, Mother?” I said when we reached the house and turned on the lights of her sitting room. She moved with a slow, feline litheness, her hands unconsciously stroking her thighs.

“You’re so young,” she said without looking at me. “You don’t know.”

And suddenly she jerked her head, looking from one to another of the expensive objects in the room, all put there by Culver with the aid of an interior decorator, and she caught up the nearest of them and threw it on the floor. It was a bowl of Lalique glass that had cost as much as the monthly salary of our night watchman. It burst with a hollow crash and then we heard tinkles as the fragments bounded to different parts of the room.

She passed her hand over her forehead as we both stood there in the silence that followed. “You’d better go to bed,” she said.

So I left her and lay awake and staring for another two hours, wondering what I might have done that I didn’t do. Finally I managed to make myself sleep by thinking about pictures I would paint and so forgot Arina. There would be all my life in which I could learn how to capture the things I perceived and set them down. Nicholas was all wrong. If I could paint as I pleased I would never see any of this misery Culver and Arina had made for each other. If everyone did the work he wanted, I thought just before I fell asleep, everyone would be happy and the world would become a paradise.

Nicholas still believes this.

5

During the middle and late Twenties I went to Princeton, for there seemed nothing else I could do. The alternative to going to college would have been a desperate sort of life with Arina, and I kept putting decisions off, knowing that I could always paint in the long vacations. Culver knew no more about colleges than anyone else who has never matriculated at one, but he wanted me to go to Princeton for some personal prejudice of his own. I think his first boss had been a Princeton man.

“Frick gave them a pretty good chemistry lab there,” he said when he was deciding what courses I should take, “and you can get all the equipment to work with you want. You’d better study chemistry chiefly. It’s getting more and more useful in the oil business. I don’t mean you just to be a chemist, of course. We’ll soon be buying chemists for not much more than we get a foreman. Plenty of them are being turned out of schools these days. Besides, I guess at Princeton you ought to make some connections that’ll be useful to us later on.”

So I went to Princeton and majored in chemistry, which I found I really liked. I learned something about it, though not very much. Other things interested me more. I became fascinated by history and read volume after volume. I learned some German and Latin because I liked the languages and a little French because it might be useful to me if ever I got to Paris to paint. The social connections I made were, from Culver’s standpoint, the worst possible, being all boys with less spending money than my own background afforded and all socialists; they happened to be the ones I liked. So I read Marx at Princeton also. I took long runs by myself along the shores of Lake Carnegie and on Sundays used to go off on long walks on the small roads behind the Trenton Pike in the direction of Hopewell and Flemington. I painted whenever I could and finally managed to graduate.

About Princeton and the time I spent there I suppose it would be possible to select several patterns and develop them, but apart from the work I did by myself they were four deadly uninteresting years. The more I learned about the world I had to live in the less confidence I felt, for no one here seemed to question the commonly-held belief that mankind was made for the furtherance of efficiency, and I was never allowed to forget that I was the son of a man whom the nation was beginning to regard as one of its high priests of efficiency. Most of the boys in my year were intending to enter business of some sort or another and for them a college education was just so much veneer. I began consciously to think of my father as a sort of destiny; to defend myself against what he stood for I had to become something a great deal better than a cipher living on his money. There were many times during these years when I could not even try to paint, for the making of pictures would seem ridiculous whenever I thought of the towns which lay between Princeton and New York: New Brunswick, Rahway, Elizabeth, Newark, Jersey City, factory after factory, slum after slum, and grey faces. This was Culver’s world; it was for this, in the long run, that Princeton prepared its men.

After commencement I went off by myself, intending a sketching trip to Maine. I got no farther than Boston. The smoking room on the train was crowded with five Babbitts, one medical student and myself. When I had entered, the medical student was apologizing because he was not a man of business.

“After all, look at the Mayos,” he was saying. “There’s a lot of money in medicine.”

The Babbitts looked him over. “Yeah, maybe there is, at that. Guess a fellow wants a doctor around when he’s sick, all right.”

One of them picked up a book I had laid on the side of the washstand. He opened it, saw my name on the fly-leaf and said, “Coming back from school?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t your father Bernard Culver?”

“Yes.”

At once the eyes of everyone in the room swivelled around.

“Where were you at?”

“Princeton.”

“Must be pretty good at that school. My boy goes to Lafayette.”

“Princeton’s a place for my money,” another of them said.

“I met your Dad once in Pittsburgh. I guess he wouldn’t remember me. He’s a great man, your father. No nonsense about him.”

The man became enthusiastic and began to talk to the smoking room at large. “You know, Mr. Culver don’t say much, but just sit there and watch him for a while! I’m telling you, he’s thinking all the time. I guess there’s not much he don’t know.”

He turned to me again, “I guess you’re going into the business?”

One of the others laughed. “You ought to ask Mr. Culver’s boy which of his father’s businesses he’s going into.”

And so the conversation continued. Had I been accustomed to Babbitts I should hardly have noticed what they said. But when the train reached Boston in the early evening I checked my bags at the station and began walking the nearby streets, hearing the talk of Italians and Irish, wanting to get the feel of people who sweated at manual work, wanting above everything else some common participation in their humanity.

It is easy enough now to see what I should have done. It seems simple to say that I ought to have taken my canvasses and painting materials and gone away to a strange town and got a job of my own and learned to paint as well as I could while I supported myself. What I did do was to turn around and go home to ask my father for money to spend a year abroad. To my surprise he granted it without argument.

He seemed to expect me. He said Eisenhardt had been talking to him and they agreed it mightn’t be a bad idea. At least I could learn French. He’d never had a chance to do that. Besides, it was a good thing to have a hobby; look at Charley Dawes; he wrote music and people said it was pretty good, too. I could have just one year.

The early part of the summer was spent more in wondering what I should do when I was finished with Paris than what I should do while I was there. My father seemed right in every judgment he made about the United States, and perhaps he was right when he said that painting would merely be my hobby. It was the only craft I ever seriously thought about. It seemed to me that it should be allowed dignity. A painter should be allowed the right of being a worker, just the same as a mechanic is allowed that right. But then, how much dignity does Culver give his mechanics? For that matter, how much do his executives possess? We should cultivate our own gardens. I had seen gardens of workers cultivated in the sooty lea of factories and tenements. We should paint for our own pleasure, because we have to paint. I had never met a man who painted just for himself and was happy doing that alone.

So all that summer I was in confusion with myself, while I read many books on many different artists. Even then I had ideas about how to paint North American scenes which would be authentic, but I lacked the technique to bring them to life. And at the end of August I left for Paris, alone, to learn how. It was Eisenhardt again who managed to keep Arina from accompanying me.

6

Looking down from the studio window I could see the fishermen standing like statues on the Quai and two men in black Hombergs drinking café au lait outside a restaurant farther down the street. Shop girls went by underneath the window, all dressed uniformly in black, their collars white and showing dirt, and the yellow sunlight seeped down through the plane trees onto the asphalt and the echoes of footsteps were broken into a multitudinous murmur under the trees, under the awnings.

It was warm today; it was really Paris and it was really the spring. I had asked M. Perodeau, the old Norman who was my master, to make some prediction about my future. Now I was waiting until he had completed the stretching of a canvas. Perhaps it would not hurt too much if he did condemn my work on a morning like this, for the air and the movement of people, the smell of pastry shops and old books in the stalls made me feel I had drunk a glass of Rudesheim and improved everything in the world.

Finally M. Perodeau had his canvas set and stood up with a grunt. He picked up a pair of brushes in his thick, peasant’s fingers, smelled them and sat down squarely on a wooden chair, twisting them around and around.

“So,” he said. “And now Mister Culver will have me tell him about the pictures he will paint fifteen, twenty, maybe twenty-five years from now. I am a socialist, but if I could tell you that I would become a capitalist. It would make me rich if I could tell my pupils all those things.”

I had expected this; I knew that my question had been stupid. “Time is important to me,” I said.

“To the son of the famous Mister Culver?” He spread out the brushes and shrugged his shoulders violently. “But my dear young man …”

“It’s just because of my famous father that time is important. Tell me frankly, am I really any good?”

“Yes.”

“How good?”

“How old are you? Twenty-two? Twenty-three? I am sixty-five and I still do not know if I am very good. You work hard, you have learned much about craftsmanship, but you do not yet know enough about people to paint a portrait. You do not understand the climate of France well enough to paint a landscape. You do not …”

“Then you mean I am no good at all?”

He got up and put his big hand on my shoulder. “You are one of my best pupils. I merely said you cannot paint a French landscape. I cannot paint an American one.”

Outside the window two students were walking past arguing. I knew one of them well and suddenly wanted to join them.

“You have learned much over here,” my teacher was saying deliberately, “but it is not for you to go home and make imitation French pictures. We let most Americans do that because it does not matter what they do. We take their money and let them do it. They like Paris … they like to sleep with the girls … they grow up here, maybe, but they are never painters. You, my friend, may become a painter, but it will take a long time. You have a sense of form … that is the main thing … and you are plastic. You do not try to write a book when you paint. You know how to work. Who knows? In ten years, perhaps? But America is a hard country. Something—what do you say—brittle about even the light in America. It takes me all my life to understand France. You cannot understand America in twenty-two years.”

“If other things were equal,” I said, “would you advise me to come back here and study again next year?”

“That is very hard to say. But I do not think so. You might spend a year in your own country painting and come back and show me what you did in that year. Then I could advise you better about the next. It works out that way, this profession.”

I breathed deeply, as though I could not have enough of this yellow, sun-warmed air in my lungs. “If I go back to America I shall have to stay there,” I said. “The famous Mister Culver would not be likely to understand whether I had made progress here or not. I shouldn’t talk, though. I use his money quickly enough.”

“And why not? My good God, he has enough! It is painful that I think no one uses it.”

“Perhaps they arrange such things more artistically in Paris.” I picked up my hat and turned away from the window. “I’d better be going,” I said. “Thank you, Monsieur, you have been very good to me.”

“What do you mean, they arrange things more artistically in Paris?”

For an instant I felt older than he. “You were born on the land, weren’t you?” I said.

“But of course! In Normandy.”

“I grew up in the country … in the brand new estate bought and built by one of the richest men in America. In Paris that might be an advantage. That’s what I meant a while ago. I would have to be a big man to be as big as an oil company, wouldn’t I? I’d have to be another Rembrandt, even?”

He was puzzled and kept staring at me. I realized then that he was interested in my face, not because of what I was saying but because he probably wanted to paint it. I laughed and thanked him again and said good morning, and going down the stairs I began to wonder about his remark. I was old in some respects, just as American industry is many years older than the French; many years nearer the twenty-first century.

As I stepped into the street and turned towards the café where I usually had lunch, the kindliness of the scene was all I could see in it. Every corner and little shop was gracious, like the wrinkles in the face of an old man painted in the seventeenth century, yet in this scene the compositions that occurred to me and that I could paint were as crude as an American suburb. But still I felt old, not in history but in the future as an American, and I had a longing to paint men as they worked on the American plan, not because they were beautiful, but because somehow or other they were the future. And at that instant it occurred to me that the reason why I could not escape my father was deeper than any blood-reason that might exist. I could escape him and what he represented no more easily than America could.

Instead of going on toward the café I turned and went back to my lodgings and began to pack my bags, dumping things in anyhow in my hurry. My appointment at the café had been to see Luigi before he left for his home in Lorbeerstein, a village in Styria, and to tell him again that I was sorry not to be able to accept his invitation. My plans had been made to leave for Pittsburgh at the end of the week.

But now I was going with him, if I could reach him in time. Luigi Beati was the only real friend I had made among the students in the Quarter. Over countless glasses of beer and wine he had told me about his home in Austria, of his father who was a political refugee from Mussolini, and how he had helped towards building up the municipal socialism in Austria after the war. Lorbeerstein had become what economists call a model village and Luigi said it was the most marvellous place in the world. Everybody was happy there, he said; they lived well and had a good time and were all socialists. I did not know during these evenings of talk that going to Lorbeerstein was to be one of the most important things in my life; I simply wanted to see more of Europe before leaving for home, and besides I liked Luigi and on this morning in Paris I knew I couldn’t go back to America quite yet.

I took a last look through drawers and cupboards, left a note and money for the concierge with a request to keep my trunk until I came back, and hurried off with one suitcase to the restaurant. Luigi was not there, but often he was late, so there was a chance that he had not come and gone. I ordered a carafe of white wine and sat and watched the people go by, my mind more or less a blank, and then after about half an hour I saw Luigi coming very fast along the opposite side of the street.

He could be seen a long way off, for he had much black hair which was never brushed and two very large buck teeth that usually showed, and he smiled easily and laughed a great deal. When he saw me he grinned broadly and shouted and a taxi nearly hit him as he started across the street without looking to left or right, his body weaving loosely as he walked, one arm swinging a duffle bag.

“Tomorrow I am in Wien,” he said in German as he sat down, “and in another week in Lorbeerstein.” Then he saw the bag beside my chair. “And you? You have decided to go home too, today?”

“No, if your invitation still stands I think I’ll go with you if I may.”

“Then we will have a good time! I did not urge you to accept because … because you seem to know what you want. But this is fine and I am glad.”

I was glad too, glad not to be leaving Luigi and his good nature yet awhile. “Is it going to take a week to get there?” I said.

“It is. I have figured everything. We walk from Wien to Lorbeerstein.”

“I thought you were in a hurry to get home.”

“To get out of Paris I am always in a hurry. But in the country I never am. You have seen Perodeau? He told you how good you are! He would have to. But you work too hard, you always work too hard, like all Americans. I tell you, I do not like that in any man.” He held up the wine to the light and grinned at it. “By Jesu, I’ll be glad to see a girl with hair that colour again!”

He drank it off and banged the heavy glass down on the table, and soon was eating with a violent, childlike gusto, talking with his mouth full and drinking all at once. It would make anyone want to eat too, just to watch him.

Two days later we were on the road to Lorbeerstein from Vienna, having sent our bags in advance. Luigi was feeling better as each day brought him nearer his village, and I knew now that he had been very homesick for Lorbeerstein all the time he had been in Paris. He was a good man to walk with, for as soon as we crossed the provincial line and entered Styria he knew someone in every village and all these people were glad to see him.

Luigi was a little older than myself but he seemed younger. He was incredibly ingenuous and loved drama. His only hope as a painter was to do something childish and get away with it, as Rousseau did. The older men at the studio never took him seriously, but Perodeau said he had a marvellous sense of colour and that when his work came off it was worth looking at.

But it was living that interested Luigi most. He had never been sick in his life and he liked doing everything. You could see him often on a fine morning standing on his toes and breathing the air deeply, rolling long syllables of Italian out of his mouth because he loved the music of the language. It was doubtful if he would ever acquire enough concentration to paint well, and when Perodeau told him so he simply laughed and said he knew he was no good and did not care. It was the women in Paris who disappointed him most. “They say I am too young,” he said with a puzzled smile. “They seem to want serious men, sad men with deep lines on their faces. In Lorbeerstein the girls are not like that.”

I don’t know what I expected Lorbeerstein to be; an old-fashioned mountain village, perhaps, with a stone church near the river and a Roman road running through the centre of the town. We walked into it early in a June evening, and from a high turn in the road the roofs of the houses lay in the valley under a thin chimney smoke. The hills folded it on three sides, and on the fourth side the road went up a defile in a long slope into the sunset. And there was a river running through, the Mur, looking cold and very swift under the ruddy light of the sun and the shadows cast by the church and the two bridges. When we came upon it Luigi gave a shout and tried to embrace me. “See, there we are! Now what do you think? Wasn’t I right? It’s the same, it’s just the same.”

The town looked tranquil and lovely and I felt tired and adventurous and looked forward to a good dinner and beer and watching the stars come out over the valley, ourselves sitting on benches in the open air near the river and hearing it swirl past the caissons of the bridge. Luigi talked steadily as we drew nearer. He said that the Mur was always cold and swift and that more people got drowned in it than in the Danube, and he pointed out a small swimming pool into which they drew fresh river water, and explained how they could release water back again into the river when it had lain too long and become stale.

We stopped at one of the outlying cottages so that Luigi might tell the old man who lived in it that he had come back, and a little later he saw another old man walking down the road ahead of us and ran after him shouting, and again I watched him caper like a five-year-old with a man in a green suit and a battered hat whom he called Karl, the best master-cobbler in the district, whose face was as brown as any leather he had ever made into a shoe.

And finally we reached the village street and the house where Luigi lived, and his father came out and kissed us on both cheeks and took us in to eat as though he had known just when we would arrive. Before we were finished the meal neighbours were coming in loudly to see Luigi and to meet me; it was wonderful to me to see how closely they all lived together and how they liked one another. And soon we were sitting in the garden behind the cottage, Luigi with a krug of beer in one hand and a girl’s fingers in the other.

Lorbeerstein was a very small community and I learned from Luigi’s father that it had attained its present form almost by accident. The landowners of the district had been ruined in the collapse of Austria after the war, and a group of socialists from Vienna and other countries had bought them out cheaply. So now many of the leading men in the community were not even Austrians, but were political émigrés from Germany and Italy.

One of these I met the first night I was there. He was a German called Richard Golcz, large, benign and shambling, with an enormous beard like pictures of Karl Marx and eyebrows as heavy as Bismarck’s. Before the war Golcz had been an anarchist. He spent ten years in Denmark as an exile and became a communist when Lenin conquered power in Petrograd. He returned to Berlin a month after Karl Liebknecht was murdered and the communist rising of 1919 had been crushed, quarrelled with the party and went to Vienna. When he saw the squalor and starvation in Vienna after the war something turned inside him; he forgot his hatreds and his quarrellings, joined the Austrian socialist party and presently came down to Lorbeerstein. To provide immediate housing, food, education and happiness was all he could think of, and although he knew Austria had become a tiny country dependent on her neighbours, he could no longer wait for a revolution to set things right. He knew that no revolution would be possible for years. So he put his hopes in the socialists, trusting that their half measures would at least do something definite before he died. And for a time, as everyone knows, they did much for Austria.

It was Golcz’s idea to turn Lorbeerstein into a model village, and he borrowed a good many of the cooperative ideas he had learned in Scandinavia to do it. When I visited the place first that summer with Luigi it had not come to its fullest development, but they had practically collectivized the small farms and stabilized the selling price of all their commodities. They grew vegetables and cherries and some grains. Golcz used to drive into Graz periodically in a small T-Model Ford to arrange prices with the merchants of the town, who hated what he stood for but half admired the man himself.

Now the village was successful. They were encouraging scientific stock farming and were planning a large packing house. They were hoping to harness the Mur for electricity. The younger men had great ideas of what could be done in Lorbeerstein and the only time I ever saw Golcz look sad was when we were together and heard some of these men of the town saying that nothing could stop them now.

“We’re too small,” Golcz said quietly. “You, being American, should know that. We are giving the children an education and now we are happy. We hope that everyone will be able to have a home for the price of one tenth of what he earns … but we’re still too small.”

That first night I spent in Lorbeerstein was the beginning of one of the best times of my life.

“Paint?” Luigi was shouting. “By God, but did old Luigi paint! I was so bad—yes I was, for you have to be miserable and hate people to paint well—anyway, I was so bad that they said I ought to be a house painter.” He indicated me, making a gesture like a stage magician. “Ecco! Now there is a painter.”

It was all like a scene in one of those Tyrolese plays the Germans enjoy, in which the Emperor Franz Joseph comes on in the third act and calls the innkeeper by his first name. I had never been much with people who could enjoy themselves, but it was a relief to see that even here Luigi rated as a character.

Old Beati, sitting next to me in the garden, leaned over and said in my ear, “This ought to show you that the old-time communists are crazy when they try to make everyone like the same sort of thing. Could you imagine the English like this?”

“Not from what I’ve heard of them.”

“Nor the Italians. In Sicily a party like this might end up with knives.”

Luigi was holding his hand up for silence, as he always did in the middle of his more pointless stories. “Now in Paris the girls are like this. They see someone with a sad face—like my friend there—and they say, I will sleep with that man. Now I ask you, what chance did I have there? No snow in the winters and no ski-running. And no girls at any time.”

There were a lot of people in the garden now and Luigi was half drunk and having a wonderful time. He had his arm around the waist of a tawny blonde who had tightly braided hair and a suntanned face and the high cheekbones of a peasant. “Where is Anie?” he suddenly said, looking about with childish anxiety.

“Why should I be telling you where she is?” the blonde said, and she turned to me. “Is it true he had no girls in Paris? He has a reputation here.”

“No,” I said, unfamiliar with their bantering. “What do you expect me to say?”

“Have I ever been found sleeping with any girl in Lorbeerstein?” Luigi shouted.

“Yes,” a boy said behind him, “with two. They say one of them ran away from you and for the sake of the girl’s reputation I want to know if it’s true.”

“Listen to him talk!” Luigi jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the boy’s direction. “That’s what comes of sending these children to school. For the sake of the girl’s reputation, I’d like to know! He shouldn’t understand so many big names.”

I looked away from the people up to the sky, where the stars were cold above the lights. My head felt tight from the beer I had drunk. All I could think was that I had come home and I knew that I had never felt as I did now when I actually had gone home.

7

“The Austrians are the only people I know who can really conspire to be happy,” said Luigi’s father the next day as we were walking down the road by the river. He looked at me over his glasses. “Do you know, I used to be a professor of history? The place softens one. These people make me warm inside. Lorbeerstein makes my knowledge a big foolishness.”

He spoke a picturesque English and had an enormous vocabulary, and he talked vivaciously, with a little pointed beard moving constantly up and down. I asked him where he had learned his English and he shrugged his shoulders. “Before the war I was much in America and England.” He smiled with some slight bitterness. “You don’t know what that war was. We were going to do big things before it came. We were great dreamers then.”

“You’re doing something pretty wonderful here right now, I should say.”

“You think so?” His raised eyebrows looked like a rebuke. “We have had … how much peace? Ten years. I am not a historian for nothing. Ten years is only a raindrop in time. I thought I heard Golcz telling you last night that we are small here. Well, David, you are half-Russian, Luigi tells me. You like philosophy?”

“I don’t know. Does one like or dislike it? One can’t help it, I guess.”

“Well, think over this. Has a man the right to make over human beings in some particular model he himself admires?”

“I don’t know. Have rights anything to do with it? It seems to me everyone gets away with as much as he can.”

“Gets away with it? Ah, I remember that phrase from America. I see you are cynical. Well, look at Luigi. I was trained by my father to be a diplomat; instead I became a professor. That wasn’t good enough so I became a socialist and finally escaped by a hairsbreadth from having my insides dissolved by Mussolini’s castor oil. You see how unsuccessful my father was in making me a diplomat. But look at Luigi now. Do you approve of what I have done with him?”

“I think Luigi’s swell,” I said.

“He certainly makes people laugh. But you notice they laugh at him, not with him.” He snorted in the enjoyment of his own dramatization. “That’s my fault. I never did anything with him. I never tried to put a single idea into his head. And what is the result? Look at him!”

He went on to explain that it was all right building up a place like Lorbeerstein but that it was doomed. I asked him why. He asked if I had read Lenin. I said I had not. He said I ought to be ashamed of myself. He asked if one was allowed to buy a copy of Das Kapital in the United States; he desired to know if there was any freedom left in America or if the capitalists had murdered it there as they had in every other country of the world but Russia and Scandinavia. Italians, he said, used to escape in hordes to America and now there was an American in Lorbeerstein who thought he was escaping from America to Austria. He had been here since the war and his daughter was the loveliest girl in the town. She excited even him, but what could a father do when he observed that she had the same effect on Luigi? Beati talked steadily onward and finally informed me that the girl’s name was Anne Lawrence and that we were on our way to her father’s house.

“Now,” he said, “do you see why I asked you about philosophy and whether a man ought to force someone else into a model he particularly admires? You don’t, so I shall tell you. Lawrence’s daughter is eighteen. She was born in America and she speaks English.” He screwed up his little face into a knot. “Lawrence hasn’t been here long enough,” he said with a comic sort of violence. “Like all Americans, he’s sentimental. America may be a terrible place but it’s better than anything over here in Europe. I said that before the war and I want to shout it now. It may be terrible but it’s better than anything here. Now … should Lawrence keep Anne in Lorbeerstein or let her go back to her uncle in the United States?”

I found myself laughing as he had intended I should. “Signor Beati …”

“All right,” he said. “The main thing is that you meet her. This is where they live.” He preceded me up a path to a door and knocked. “I talk too much. Since I left the university I have been an affliction to everyone. It is terrible when a professor—and a socialist—loses his work. I used to talk five hours a day, steadily, and was paid for it. Now …”

The door opened and I saw Anne for the first time. She was a tall girl, lithe rather than lean, with flaxen hair, and when she spoke she had a deep slightly husky voice which came as a surprise.

“Hello David Culver,” she said, “Luigi wrote me about you.”

She shook hands frankly, with a firm grasp like a boy’s, and then stood aside so we might go in. The cottage was charmingly arranged; somewhat more picturesque than the homes of the Austrians and a lot more comfortable.

Her wide eyes surveyed me frankly as I sat down, and I was too shy to say more than: “I see you’re still Americans.”

“Yes? Father tells me I speak English with a German accent.”

“I mean your chairs, they’re so comfortable.”

Beati interrupted: “I’ve been telling David that you’re going to the U.S.A. in a few years. He thinks it’s a good idea.”

“I’m afraid those aren’t exactly my words,” I said.

Anne, sitting somewhat awkwardly on the only ottoman in the room, her husky voice still surprising me, said she could remember nothing of America but the New York skyline and the Jersey lightning which used to frighten her when she was a child. “My uncle writes to Father twice a year and every letter tells him what a fool he is not to come home. You know, David,”—she used my name unselfconsciously—“we’re cranks. Even Father is beginning to admit that.”

“Everyone in Lorbeerstein is a crank, for that matter,” Beati said sententiously. “All the people in the wide world who couldn’t fit at home came here to live. It’s almost a league of nations.”

“I’m afraid I’m not going to like it over there,” Anne said. “I won’t know how to dress, for one thing. I hate wearing a hat and here I practically never have to.”

“That’s a little thing to worry about.”

“Yes, but I’m nearsighted besides, and whenever I go to a town I have to wear glasses. Big horn-rims. Otherwise I can’t read the signs and when I can’t do that I think I’m missing something, maybe. But Father tells me that a girl with glasses in America hasn’t a chance.”

Beati became gallant and very Italian and began making elaborate compliments, saying that Anne had never been seen in her life with glasses, until finally she reached into a drawer and drew out a pair and set them on her nose. They did not seem to make much difference to her appearance; her wide eyes were too intense for glasses to obscure them.

She was the first girl I ever had for a friend. In Paris on some evenings with students I had gone with girls whose names I hardly knew and been shy and clumsy with them. I was so bad that the wine I had drunk had been the only excuse for me, and they had gone with me because they wanted sex and nothing else. I could remember four of them, all French, who had set to work on me with such an air of semi-professional detachment that I might almost have been something ready-made for them. Now, although I could remember the colour of their hair and the shape of their bodies, I could only recollect the name of one of them. But between Anne and Luigi and me everything was equal, and although she could speak three languages and had acquired individual mannerisms from the peculiarity of her life, she seemed to be a basically integrated person who was pleased by the simplest things. She knew the whole countryside around Lorbeerstein as well as the gypsies did, and could keep up with us on day-long hikes which would leave me tired out. She was an expert swimmer, too, and was something worth seeing in the pool. It had a floor of gravel and limestone, and the tawny sunburned colour of her skin stood out beautifully against the cobalt of that translucent water. Because of her, this summer was the finest I had ever spent, and as my painting went well, I even began to toy with the idea of staying here permanently.

It was old Beati who made me see the impossibility of this. One day as I was painting, the easel set up on a street-corner and a small group of kids standing behind me watching with great respect, he came along and tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up from my work and saw him standing there, nodding approvingly.

“Good,” he said, his goatee wagging. “I like it.” With a series of sweeping gestures he shooed the kids away. “Now I want to talk to you.”

“Yes?”

“You’re pretty good, for your age.”

“And I guess that’s about all,” I said, and told him a little of Perodeau’s judgment of my work. “I don’t see why it should take me such a long time to learn to be an artist.”

He nodded. “Your master is right, though. You have a long road ahead of you. There is in your work no—what is the word—no absolute knowledge of what you mean—nothing absolute. Do you follow?”

I followed easily enough and he went on to tell me why. “Art cannot exist in a vacuum, my friend, and that is precisely what you are trying to make it do. What’s this I’ve been hearing of your planning to stay here? I’ll be sure it comes from that young fool Luigi.”

“A man could do a lot worse than live here.”

“Ye-e-e-s, much worse, very much worse. But not you. You’re an American. Listen, you remind me of myself when I was young. I had a strong man for a father, too.”

“You too know about my father, then? I thought no one here—”

“I can read. I also know about Henry Ford. Don’t be a sentimental fool and think that just because this is a nice place it has a chance of existing any length of time. Lorbeerstein isn’t the way the world is going to go, only the way a few of us would like it to go. Lorbeerstein is an attempt to do what you have been trying to do. It also is a vacuum. It is socialism in a vacuum. All Austria is socialism in a vacuum.”

“Yet, you go on with it.”

He stared at me and his eyes were suddenly sad: “How simple, how blessedly simple you Americans are! David … don’t you see? I’m not American. Once—once upon a time I was Italian.”

“Of course. I’m sorry.”

He laid his hand on my arm, seeming pathetically small and frail, for his head reached only to my chin. “In America you suffer—I know what you’re thinking—but it’s the way the young suffer. From accidents, from your own too much energy. Here we suffer like old men from disease after disease, yes, until our whole organism freezes into death.” He looked over the roofs of the town to the hills. “We have beauty here,” he said simply, “as my father had beauty when he knew he was going to die. He used to sit out in the sun day after day in a bath chair and watch the shadows move along the Tuscan hills and read his Vergil.”

I felt awkward. “Thank you,” I managed to say.

“Well, well, that’s said. I talk too much, as usual. In America you are too young to be articulate. You believe in drama still. We over here—as a man grows older he believes in drama no more, only in ritual. He knows what is going to happen. He lives, not to change the world, but to experience it.”

And then he clapped me on the shoulder and hurried off down the street, his back bowed and his slouched hat casting a grotesque shadow on the cobbles in front of his feet. I looked back at my canvas and then to the scene I had been trying to paint and I knew he was right; so right that I had no decision left to make. The son of Bernard Culver could hardly exile himself in Lorbeerstein. It must have been difficult enough for Anne’s father, a socialist who had worked with the American Relief Commission in Vienna after the war; for me, it was impossible.

Then I began to receive letters from home urging me to return. Arina was simply lonely. Culver, making no reference to my painting, merely stated that he had given me a year’s holiday and it was high time I started to work; a job was ready. Eisenhardt wrote at length. He was apparently trying to keep me from burning my boats before it was too late, and advised me at least to try Culver’s offer.

So I gathered my belongings and prepared to leave. I spent the last week trying to paint a portrait of Anne but the result was very bad indeed, although I took the canvas with me and kept it for years afterwards. Luigi and his friends drove me to the railway station and I went away looking out a third-class carriage watching them sink into the background, Anne not laughing at all and Luigi waving a scarf furiously about his head. I felt empty and alone.

Later in the day the train pulled into Vienna and ran through the slums of the city, acre on acre of factories smoking in the twilight and many lighted streetcars and trains going to and fro. When finally I got out of the station into the street and felt again the pulse of a city and saw the city-faces and smelled the odour of streets, the image of Lorbeerstein became utterly unreal. I had spent two months there but they might have been passed by another person. I never expected to see it again.

8

When I reached home I found that neither Arina nor Eisenhardt was well. Arina’s hair had become white during the last few years and her figure had begun to stiffen. Eisenhardt had become a chronic invalid, still thinking clearly, however, and when I went in to see him he was sitting in an armchair cutting a cigar. He smoked imported ones from Cuba and used them like a Spaniard for emphasis in his conversation. I was shocked to see how frail he looked; although his battered face was still undaunted it seemed very old and his voice was apt to break hesitantly as he spoke.

“Well David,” he said, after I sat down, “I’ve not much longer. My heart has been lousy for years and now the doctors say I’ve probably got other things too. That means they know I have. Funny, the way doctors are. They must have a terrible opinion of human courage. I can’t make them tell me what it is, but by God, my gut tells me fast enough!”

“Is there much pain?”

He winced slightly. “It comes and goes. I get used to it. But tell me about Europe.”

“Well, it was quite a year. I’m glad I had it. I—”

For some reason I could not go on with what was in my mind, and Eisenhardt, glancing at me shrewdly, inhaled a lot of cigar smoke and blew it out in rings, watching them as they dissolved. Then he spoke slowly, his cigar-hand moving away from his lips in rhythm with his words. “I shouldn’t be smoking. In fact I shouldn’t be doing anything at all.” Then, his voice sharper: “what’s the matter with you?”

“What do you mean, Uncle Edward?”

“You know what I mean. We’re both more or less in a jam, aren’t we? Tell me what it is?”

“Maybe it’s just a hangover from adolescence,” I said. But I had leaned on this man all my life and I knew I must talk it out with him. “Father has a job waiting for me. Briefly, that’s the trouble.”

“Are you going to take it?”

“I certainly don’t want to. Most people would be glad of it, I know all that, but …”

“You don’t have to apologize to me, you know.”

“Yes, I know. It’s only that. I suppose I’d have to be a pretty good painter to make people forget that I’m the son of one of the richest men in America.”

I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, puffing out the smoke slowly, “Considering how much money an artist doesn’t make, most people would say you were lucky to have a rich father. Still … I guess maybe I know what you mean. I suppose you’ve thought of the possibility of your father’s cutting you off?”

For a second I was annoyed. “I know money means a lot, but I wasn’t thinking about that, and you know it.”

He grinned and leaned forward. “I get it. You want to be a bigger shot than your old man?”

I felt sheepish, then very angry, and the words began to pour out and Eisenhardt sat still and listened to them.

“I hate everything he stands for. Not only the way he mechanizes life but every damn thing he does to achieve it. It’s death. I learned that much this last year in Europe. It freezes people’s souls until they die. And if that’s not enough, there’s always a war to do it quicker. He doesn’t understand that, of course. That’s what makes it worse. If he did understand it I could perhaps get along with—”

“No, you couldn’t,” Eisenhardt interrupted in a voice become very stern and hard. “When a man does things like you say your father does, and is unconscious of them—that’s bad enough. But if he deliberately sets out to beat the world that way”—he shook his head gravely—“there are people who do that, David, and they’re called criminals. Sometimes they’re politicians, too. And they’re worse than your father.”

There was a moment of silence. Then I said: “He’s never been able to understand what having a son means.”

Eisenhardt nodded: “You’re right there.”

“Well,” I burst out, “if I can’t prevent him from turning everyone he touches into a robot I can at least remain a human being myself.”

“Then you’ve already settled it. You don’t take the job. You can go on with your painting.”

We looked at each other a long time. I felt utterly wretched and said: “That’s the point. A man I met in Europe said to me that you can’t paint in a vacuum and I’ve found out he’s right. I can’t do it yet, anyway.”

Eisenhardt, looking up at the ceiling, said reflectively: “Funny thing, though it seems reasonable for me to get old I can’t get used to the idea of you and Nicholas growing up too.” He grunted. “You’ve certainly learned a lot these last few years.”

“It can’t be much fun listening to me talking like this,” I said.

“I thought I told you not to apologize to me. Everybody’s got to talk sometimes. I guess I talk enough about my own pains these days. I’m not an artist, but the way I look at it, your father is a sort of artistic problem to you. Is that right?”

“I don’t know about how accurate your adjective is … Yes, in a way you’re right.”

“Then,” he went on with a peculiar grin, “I guess you’d better take the old boy’s job. You’ll get a lowdown on a lot of things you don’t know about now. And if you want to solve your problem, David, you’ll have to meet him where he lives, and that’s the only way to do it.”

I got up and began to walk about the room; I suppose I had known all along that I would have to take the job. We were all like iron filings near the magnet; one way or another the Culvers of America were calling the tune.

Eisenhardt’s slow voice came from the depths of the chair. “By the way, have you heard from Nicholas lately?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t written to him. What’s he doing?”

“As far as I can make out, he’s become a communist.”

“Good lord!”

“He wrote from New York a while ago saying how much he hated business. For God’s sake, what did he expect to do, like it? He’s a logical boy, is Nicholas. He should go far.”

“What do you mean, logical?”

“What do you think I mean? He’s another of these people who hates mechanization. Therefore he joins a group which doesn’t actually happen to possess the machine but worships it instead.” He sounded bitter now. “I guess I’m better out of the way. I must have made a mess of bringing that boy up, giving him the lowdown on so many things the way I used to do. He’s got brains without tolerance and I didn’t realize how ambitious he was. Now, when he finds out that the world won’t give any of us a clean success, he sets out to reform it. A man should grow backwards, or something. I don’t want Nicholas to wait until he’s fifty to find out what I knew at that age. I want him to have a happy life.”

“Do you object to his being a communist?”

“Object? I don’t object to anything he does. But I don’t want him to become twisted. A man grows by what he feeds on. If he thinks about evil all the time—I don’t want him to go around feeling that every man’s hand is against him. And it is, in that racket.”

He stopped and looked searchingly at me; his expression was strange, sardonic and at the same time sad. “Do you know what I was twenty years ago?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“I’ll bet you never thought of it, either.” He chuckled to himself. “I used to be one of those old-time Wobblies. I threw up the only real job I ever had, working for them. When I was fifty I looked over my life and took stock—oh, quite suddenly. I’d failed in every single thing I’d ever attempted. The bottom just dropped out for me. And then, when I was feeling like that, a few nights later, I saw a dirty-faced urchin sitting by himself on a doorstep. That was Nicholas. The union I had been working for had collapsed in one of the toughest strikes I ever had anything to do with. We’d managed it badly and got what we asked for. Some of my pals were in jail and I hadn’t anything to do. It occurred to me that all the union work I’d done had given me a pretty fair idea how the land lay in business and industry. I certainly knew which concerns were sound and which weren’t. I knew if I liked I could get into the minds of a lot of the promoters and operators around town.”

He stopped and snuffed out his cigar and methodically prepared another. I knew this excessive smoking must be very bad for him, but I didn’t think of suggesting that he stop.

“So, David, I set out to make money, cynically. The luck held, and inside of six years I had plenty to retire on. No great fortune, mind you, but enough.” He stopped, and the weariness came through his smile. “That’s the story. I guess few men’s lives go the way they’ve planned them.”

My face must have shown my amazement. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“You’re sure you can’t paint?” he asked abruptly.

“I don’t know. I’m sure I can’t right now.”

He sighed: “Well, to criticize the way an artist looks at things doesn’t make sense. What an artist needs is just a whole lot of encouragement. Anyone that’s trying to do something decent needs that. So … I encouraged Nicholas to be a communist.”

He closed his eyes and I watched the light that came into the room through high old windows. Outside there were apple trees and burr oaks and a single elm and now they were turning brown and dry in the sun. When I was a boy I had climbed them all. I heard his voice speaking very earnestly.

“The world’s in for a tough time, do you know?” Looking at him quickly again I saw that his eyes were still shut. He seemed to be talking to himself. “On one side your father, on the other Nicholas. Markets contracting every year, machines getting bigger every year, destructiveness increasing, too many big cities—Ach, Nicholas on one side and your father on the other! I don’t want to see the result they make, between them.”

I was troubled. His face was flushed and he pulled hard on the shortening cigar. “I’ve never heard you talk like this before,” I said.

“No? I guess lately the pain in my gut has been making me talk too much. Like alcohol. Besides, you’re older. You might as well begin getting used to taking it.”

“What you say seems pretty true.”

“Yes, and does knowing the truth matter much these days?” His voice was almost ruthlessly cool, but his grey eyes, looking steadily at me, had grown softer. “Fortunately, knowing some truth matters a great deal. Now that I’m useless I’ve learned what things are important, and the politicians don’t know all the answers. Love matters. Being a man matters. Beauty matters. You wouldn’t take me for a religious man, would you, David?”

“I always thought you were a rationalist.”

“A nice, nineteenth century point of view! Can’t a man be rational and believe anything?” He looked straight at me. “When my wife died, David, I knew that love of human beings, one for the other, counted more than anything else. This foolish talk about the omnipotence of the machine! When she died I was hit—hard. After my brain cleared up, all this eagerness about politics and fighting and violence went out. In the old days, back in the time of the Greeks, no one ever tried much to justify violence and ambition the way we do. They knew such things for what they were worth.” He shaded his eyes with his hand, his old characteristic gesture. “At the end of his life a man can have quite a few things rolled up to his credit, particularly if he has raised a family and achieved something he was proud of doing. But to feel alone at the end of one’s life—that used to be my horror. But now that the end is near—well, I’m content. In my father’s house are many mansions. I don’t believe it exactly but it expresses more or less what I feel.”

I was intensely moved; I wanted to tell him how much he had done for me, to ask him more specifically what he meant. But I could find no words.

His expression was quizzical. “Just as soon as you can, get yourself married. A man’s life runs pretty thin if he stays single.” And then he smiled.

“You know,” I said, “all this while I never knew you had been married.”

“It was one of the things I just didn’t mention, I guess.” His cigar had gone out. He reached for the matchbox and relit it. “We were inseparable. We did everything together from the time I was twenty and she was nineteen. But we had no children. She died the day before I found Nicholas.”

There was silence and the moment seemed suspended. The curtains swung inward from the windows as a small breeze struck them and it was as if a ghost were entering. Eisenhardt in his long chair was half hidden in the shadows. I found myself imagining that I stood at the end of all time looking backward at the generations which had flowed over the earth hunting new pastures in their struggle with nature. Now, in the age of Bernard Culver, the struggle with nature had been won. We were apparently helpless because men like Culver continued to act as though the age-long struggle was still necessary.

“Action,” said Eisenhardt, and I was startled as though he were reading my thoughts, “is often just another illusion. That’s what your father will never understand until he is a very old man. But thank God there are some things that do last. Listen David, the world’s in for a bad time. At least it’s going to seem a bad time. But as long as you can be sure that there are more good people than swine in it I guess you’ll be all right.”

“Is that your religion?” It sounded a stupid thing to say.

“That’s not a religion, David, but it’s not far from it. You mustn’t let this serious talk worry you. I’ve been alone too much and reading too many books. Perhaps I’m really worried about Nicholas after all. I don’t like to see anyone begin to hate people.”

“He’ll be all right, Uncle Edward. You mustn’t worry about him.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Which of your father’s various enterprises does he want you to enter?”

“I haven’t seen him yet. I just got in this morning. I wanted to talk to you first.”

“Better take anything he gives you. If you can’t escape into your painting . . . well, there’s nothing like being paid money to increase a man’s confidence.”

“All right, and I’ll remember what you’ve said.”

His housekeeper brought in a tray of food for both of us and we sat drinking milk and munching toast and watching the sun go down and finally I left him dozing in his chair.

I walked down the driveway to the road, taking deep breaths as I went. It was nearly dark now, the sky luminous, and in the east no colour. The stars were already bright; their image was a fixation with me, occurring constantly in my mind when I was tired. I watched them now, one after the other appearing; through the millions of miles I saw their light, remembering that the light of the stars had started on its way before I was a plasm. Why should I torment my nervous system in struggling and trying to understand other compounds of carbon and water like myself? It seemed an important question; it still does.

At home I found Arina waiting for me. And after a long, one-sided talk she shut herself in her room and had hysterics. From behind her door I could hear the sounds she made, but notwithstanding I wrote a note to Culver saying that I would begin work whenever he wanted me.

For a long time now I had avoided any kind of serious discussion with Arina. Now she was crying like a child, saying that this was my first night home but that I was paying no attention to her and that she had lost me forever. I was going to Culver’s side and leaving her. She understood so little that she blamed her disappointment with life on America alone, and the only times she was not unhappy seemed to be quiet moments with me or noisy moments when she was telling someone else how much she hated the country she had to live in.

I finally went to her after the letter was written and found her lying face downward on the bed. She looked up when I stood beside her. “Why do you want to make me so unhappy? Even you. Can’t America let anyone alone? Twenty-three years, twenty-four years … that’s a life sentence!”

I put an arm about her. “Mother,” I said, “please, please don’t talk like that. I’m back now and everything is going to be better.”

Her eyes looked insane. “I looked forward for twenty years to when you would become a man,” she said. “You would be a famous artist and people in London and Paris would point out your work and we would go away from here and be happy together. And now!”

She began to cry again, but pulled herself up from the bed. With a peculiar, sly expression she went over to a chest, opened a drawer and came back with a roll of bills. “Do you want this? I have three thousand dollars in the house. I can easily get more. I can always get money.”

She tried to put it in my hand. “Take it. I can always get money for you. Take it and we’ll be able to stay here and you’ll paint again.”

“Yes, Mother, of course.” I put the money back in her hand. “And I’ll come back from the city and see you. This won’t change anything between us.”

She shook her head and looked at her own hands holding the money; she was not crying now but seemed stunned, as though she had no exact knowledge of what was going on about her. For me the moment was horrible; I realized that she had been dreading this moment for twenty years, knowing it would turn out just like this, yet always had been supported by the hope that somehow it might be different. There was a peculiar smile on her face as I left her. Was it relief?

I went back to my room and tried to sleep. In a sense my own understanding served as an inoculation against these scenes with Arina, for I knew that she never recognized what she was fighting against and that there was nothing brutal in Culver’s indifference. If he had not been busy all the time, had he lived in his own house instead of sleeping in hotels in town, the sexual frustrations of them both might have transformed all three of us into the likeness of one of Dostoyevsky’s Russian homes. As it was, we were merely isolated, and in intense loneliness we talked and touched each other, we moved across the line of each other’s vision and made sounds against the drums of each other’s ears, and this was all.

9

On September first of that year, which was 1929, I began to work for my father. My mind was a well of all sorts of ideas except the ones he could use. I did not know how to earn my living, speak to my boss, fill in my spare time, drink, plan for the future, paint a portrait or sleep with a woman.

Culver was in the central office of his oil company when I presented myself to him. His hair was a little thinner than when last I had seen him, there were pockets of flesh about his throat and he looked dry. I noticed a box of soda tablets lying on his desk and thought what a comfort it was to know that he had anything so human as indigestion.

“I got your letter,” he said. “Sit down.” I took a seat opposite him, and the enormous expanse of his desk divided us, quite as it should do according to Hollywood. “I’m glad to see you’re showing some sense.”

He had never been more cordial; he was really trying to be as kind as he knew how, yet he was speaking to me as though I were a new business acquaintance. I was soon enough able to lay it to his supreme power of concentration.

“Muller and Richardson,” he said slowly, “have their boys working with them. I might as well say I’m glad we’re going to be associated too.” His left hand was fiddling, rather stiffly, with some papers. “Now I’ve been wondering what to do with you and I think I have it figured out. You don’t know a thing about my organizations, do you?”

“Not very much.” I felt abominably awkward. “I know about the oil company and the rolling mills. I suppose I …”

“Yes, well I have an appointment in a few minutes. I don’t want to cut you short. You’d better have dinner with me tonight. Tell the chauffeur where to pick you up. Now I want to give you the main idea … You start in Monday morning, at seven, in the old rolling mill here in town. Kraus is running it and I know you’ll like him. I want you to get a good factual idea of how the place runs and the only way to do that is to start in at the bottom. You’ve got to learn how a workman feels about things. That’s how you learn how to handle him. Then you’d better read up some general books on steel so you’ll know what it’s all about. You don’t have to be any Bessemer, but you do have to learn the general processes we put the ore through. Is that clear?”

I said it was. He looked at his watch and went on hastily, saying that after a few months work as a common labourer, where the men were not to know who I was, Kraus was to give me some clerical work. I was to learn the general idea of how steel was marketed and the ore purchased. I was to learn how to pick men for jobs and how to fire those they did not want. I was to learn generally about prices and profits and Culver reckoned that after a year of this I ought to be broken in enough to take a technical post in one of his other companies, though I would be able to remain at the rolling mill if I preferred. Kraus was to present him with a detailed report of my work at the end of the year, prospects, adaptability, knowledge and common sense.

“It’s common sense an executive needs,” he ended the conversation as portentously as though it were his own discovery, “and the ability to judge men and make them work. That’s what you’re here to learn.”

When the stock market broke I was working with the men in the yard of the rolling mill, liking the feel of the rough clothes and the constant sweat on my back and chest, enjoying the comradeship of the hunkies in the outfit. I paid little attention to the market crash at the time, and it was three months before any of us at the mill were directly affected.

Then in the first week of December Kraus called me into his office and in a clumsy way tried to sound me about my father. He said he had lost heavily on the market himself and wanted to know what Culver thought about it. When I told him I knew nothing and seldom saw my father to talk to he just shook his head. I think it was several months before he realized just how little I did know. Kraus had grown up with steel and he liked the work. This was his whole world, and I gathered that he was apprehensive about Culver, afraid of failing him and at the same time afraid that Culver might close down the plant.

“We haven’t got a real order for a month,” he said and watched me carefully. When I said nothing he went on. “Well, your father has given me instructions about you. I guess you know what they are. I guess you better start next week here in the office.”

Kraus did not like the idea of having me around, I could see that, but he was so inarticulate that unless he was giving orders around the plant he was incapable of expressing any idea whatever except by monosyllables, silences, grunts and vague remarks that had no clear connection with what was in his mind.

“Maybe you better see your father before you start in here,” he said.

So during the next week I managed a short appointment with Culver, who looked no more grim than usual but very tired. I told him what Kraus had said and he nodded. “Kraus is a good man. I suppose he thought you’d been seeing me. Well, don’t tell him anything I say. There’s going to be a lot of people asking you questions. Don’t talk, do you understand?”

He went on to explain that the break in the market was going to cause a depression. He admitted that he had not foreseen it, but now it had arrived he believed it would be a very good thing for the country. There was too much wildcat business about and this would stop it. His main interest was not to make money for a few years but entrench his power, and when the upswing in the economic cycle appeared he felt confident it would find a few monopolies stronger than ever and the unions definitely weaker. He asked if I had run into any union officials and when I said I had not he answered that my ignorance of them was a good thing.

There followed the winter of 1930. During this time, day by day, the new world I had become a part of hammered at my senses. Behind the face of every human cipher I worked with on Kraus’s executive staff, fear was the predominant emotion, and as they never dared show this fear, it corroded them like acid. Three officials were discharged before March and the rest fought like suave yahoos for their diminished salaries, for the chance of doing twice as much work as was fit for any man, for the chance to continue being an American and not an unemployed outcast. Among the workers there had been a fleshly sort of comradeship, but here none; for they worked at their figures like machines, trying to cut costs, and as the best way to cut costs was to devise ways of making one man do the work of two, the whole plant became a house of degradation, everyone driven by the laws of his employment to obtain credit for being a valuable man. The most invaluable among my colleagues that winter was the one who devised a new formula for arranging the work schedule of the whole plant, so that when it was put into effect two more executives and a hundred and eighteen men were struck off the payroll.

During that winter I became a machine myself, a machine in my body, with a mind free like a sneering audience. “You have to know how to fire men,” I remembered Culver saying. “It’s tough at first, but if you don’t get hardened when you’re young you never will, and if you don’t learn this you’ll never know how to handle men. Always remember that it’s not your fault. We employ all we can, but we also employ as little as we can. The secret of success is to do much with little.”

So during the spring I had a room in the office overlooking the yard and served as a sort of link between Kraus and the workers. Men would come into me, men with whom I had worked, and beg for their jobs. Every week we seemed to be letting more of them out. And so my body moved mechanically, but my mind seemed to see nothing but rusting scrap heaps and grey-faced men in the offices and robots in ignominious silhouette to the glory of the molten iron they handled. Had times been better or had I been tougher it might have been a grand sight to see the sweating dorsal muscles of some huge hunkie shining in the light of the furnaces, but during this winter no one I saw seemed to possess an atom of dignity. They were not even able to think they had dignity when they knew that another month might see them beggars. I wondered how often my colleagues in the office went home and found their wives fresh and clean for them and how often they woke in the nights and held their wives closely and whispered that it was all right, the job was going fine, while all the time their minds were like ice, wondering, always wondering why, and never daring to ask. What lay behind the figures they made on paper they could not understand, nor could they choose what sort of figures to make. A sweet and comely thing it is to die for the company. So I put it, and was as helpless as the rest. Take what we give you! So Culver put it, and was also helpless.

Painting was possible for me only in the nights. I used to go three nights a week to an old room I had rented and try to paint by myself. I have a few examples of the work I perpetrated that winter and can hardly bear to look at them. They crawl with fear, guilt and hatred. Sometimes I went home on weekends and saw Arina and Eisenhardt, but more often I was alone. I can’t remember the number of nights I walked about Pittsburgh looking for strangers to talk to or how often I followed strange women about the streets, not really wanting them but hoping they would turn and say something. I was even glad if they stopped at a corner and said it would cost two dollars, one for themselves and one for a room, and sorry when they went on because I was afraid to give them business. And in the mornings there was always work again, and Kraus’s ugly, squat face, and the dry bitterness of people who knew that their work was not wanted.

Then suddenly in the spring Uncle Edward died.

They told me that a stroke took him and that he was found in his bed on a Saturday morning by the woman who cooked his meals. She called a doctor, but was too flustered to remember much else, so it was Sunday before a wire reached Nicholas in New York and he was unable to get word to me until Monday night. By the time I arrived in Greensburg the funeral was already over, and when I discovered how few the mourners had been, it came over in a wave how like recluses we had all lived here.

When I reached the old house Nicholas was alone. We had not met for a year and had never written to each other, but for half an hour we sat before an open fire, each one feeling more comfortable because the other was there. Nicholas looked years older. His face was so different it might have suffered a sea change during the past year. It was plain that he had been working and worrying and keeping late hours; but I felt that he liked having me there, and the old habit of taking each other for granted was in itself a rest for us both.

“I’ve been looking over some of Father’s papers,” he said after a while. “He left a larger estate than I thought. And he left it all to me.”

Nicholas was tense and lean and I could see why Uncle Edward had said that most people were uneasy in the same room with him. He rarely flicked his eyelids or twisted his face, and his hands were always still, but his movelessness gave out a feeling of intolerable strain. The muscles of his thighs were tense and hard against his chair. To hear him talk one would think he felt constantly guilty about something.

“Now I’ll be able to get married,” he went on. “Isn’t that just splendid? You know … it’s an ill wind and so on.”

“I didn’t know you had any plans like that,” I said.

“Oh, yes, I’m going to get married all right. She’s coming up tonight. We’ve been living together the past year, but from now on we can afford to get it legally.”

Yes, Nicholas would make most people uncomfortable, but I only laughed at him. “Why is it any easier now?” I said.

“No self-respecting man would marry a girl he couldn’t afford to support. Do you get the idea? He lives with her instead, but he’s too self-respecting to tie her down for life if he can’t look out for her. That’s good reasoning, good bourgeois reasoning.” He threw a cigarette butt into the fire. “That’s how much I’m emancipated from the bourgeoisie!” he said savagely.

“You certainly know how to figure things out, Nicholas, but it doesn’t make sense. In fact, it sounds damn silly. What’s she like?”

“You’ll be able to look her over. She’s intelligent. She’s bourgeois, really—all women are you know—but she’s got guts. I’ve been making about ten dollars a week in New York. She makes thirteen, so we live in luxury, just like Mr. and Mrs. Browning!”

I could see him appraising me as he had never done before, watching me as though I were a stranger who had met him for the first time and might think he was a failure. “How do you like steel?” he said. “I know about that plant of yours. You let out about half your men this winter, didn’t you?”

I got up and walked about the room. It was impossible for me to sit quietly, supporting the strain of his stillness. “I’m not a capitalist, if that’s that you’re driving at,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve changed much since I talked to you last.”

When I turned I saw tears in his eyes. His throat muscles tightened, then relaxed. “Most of the men I knew in Yale, when I meet them now, look at me as if I were crazy,” he said. “They think you’re mad if you aren’t a wolf like themselves.”

“Is it as violent as that where you are?” I was wondering whose perceptions were right, mine or his. At that time he saw everything in flame and violence. To me, industry had been cold and indifferent.

“There are millions unemployed,” he said harshly. “There are going to be more. More than half the nation. I’m telling you this … before this depression is over there’s going to be revolution!”

“I hope so.”

“You what!” His face changed expression then. “You don’t mean that … with all your money?”

“All my father’s you mean, not mine.”

Then he was silent again for a long time, trying to fit me into his dialectic.

After sunset we went down to the main road to meet his girl. Nicholas tried to drop communism from the conversation while he explained to me that he had met her in New York, that she was a graduate of Wellesley, that there was no such thing as romantic love, that she had sense enough to realize this and that they understood each other. She was by nature a generous person and didn’t try to sell herself when she slept with him. I asked him if love was ruled out of Marxism and he got angry and told me I ought to read what the party was doing instead of obstructing it by cheap sneers, and after this it took another five minutes before communism could be forced out of the conversation again.

We stood on the roadside in the clearing where the buses stopped and the smell of fried onions and mustard drifted through the night air from the open windows of a diner. A few truck drivers and a passenger were sitting at the lunch counter, and the truck drivers were in some argument or other. We could hear them talk.

“In the next war I’m telling you all you need is no army, just a bunch of scientists.”

“Yeah, and what’ll you do with a bunch of scientists?”

“Just stickem around, stickem around and let ’em work.”

The lights of the bus appeared like the beam of a searchlight sweeping the hillside. There was silence except for the muttered remarks of the truck drivers and the sizzling of onions and the singing of frogs in a distant marsh.

“You know,” Nicholas offered, “Jean’s had a hard time.”

“What’s the rest of her name?”

“I thought I’d told you. Yes, she’s had a pretty hard time.”

We could hear the engine of the bus as it drove up the long hill towards the stop, and Nicholas began to talk hurriedly, describing Jean’s fortune as though it were a primary virtue. I could think of people who had had a worse life. Her mother had been dead for years and her father, a minister, had died the year she graduated. She had gone to New York to look for a career because she didn’t like living with her aunts in New England, and she had found one in Macy’s basement, selling hats. She was fired after the rush season ended, then worked for an employment agency. When Nicholas met her she was making investigations about wages paid the female help in restaurants, a line of work later taken over by the Minimum Wage Board. Staying with this, Jean had finally become a civil servant. When the bus stopped in front of us, Nicholas was still describing her as though she were a set of statistics.

The first impression Jean made upon me was that of a girl who knew what it was all about, the type one seems to find only in America. She looked as if she could be both tough and gentle. She was exceedingly short and sturdily built, wore a beret over black hair, had curves in the right places and seemed to know it. She threw an old bag from the door of the bus onto the ground, followed it in one jump and put both hands on Nicholas’s ears as she pulled his face down to hers and kissed him. Yet her voice was tender when she said, “Poor old boy, I’m sorry I’ve been so long getting here.”

“That’s all right.” His voice was husky with emotion. “Jean, this is David.”

She turned to me with a wide smile; then the three of us began walking up the road to the old house, Nicholas very silent and Jean talking about her bus trip. Obviously she had a direct physical effect on him, for he seemed far less nervous when finally we reached the door.

Eisenhardt’s housekeeper, worn out by the events of the past few days, had already gone to bed, so Jean found her way to the kitchen and prepared a supper of scrambled eggs, bacon and toast while we stood and watched her. As we ate I found myself watching them as they sat side by side, his hand on her thigh, while Jean’s cigarette—she seemed to smoke constantly—sent up a plume of curling smoke like a veil between myself and them. It was obvious that Jean’s feelings for Nicholas were not what he considered them to be. He thought she needed his support; quite the opposite seemed to be the case. Their intimacy made me feel desperately lonely.

I gathered from their conversation that Jean had needed all her toughness to put up with the life they had made together. For his sake she had given up all her old friends and taken on his, and he seemed to have all kinds now, from down-and-outers to hardboiled union officials. She went to live with him, taking all the chances, and although for much of the time their rooms smelled like the smoking compartment on a day coach she never complained, but bore the confusion of his quarters and the ignorance of his friends and the bad smells and the metallic loneliness of life in New York, cooked his meals and did her job, and had intercourse with him just about as often as he desired. After I knew her better I discovered that she had once become pregnant and had an abortion even though she wanted the child. When she yielded to him in this, she decided there was no help for her: for better or for worse, she was in love with him, and because he was a natural ascetic whose conscience usually managed to torment him, she generally had to pay lip service to his opinions to spare his worrying about her.

After supper, when we went into the living room and Jean went over to Nicholas where he sat, tired out, in Eisenhardt’s long chair, I felt cold and useless. I had never had this intimacy with any woman; the only one I had gone with in Pittsburgh merely lay down and looked up at me and said absentmindedly, “Go ahead, it’s your nickel.” When Jean whispered something in his ear I got up to go, but immediately Nicholas leaped out of his chair, so suddenly he spilled her on the floor.

“Please don’t go,” he said, “Jean wants to talk to you.”

He looked down at her, his lean figure dwarfing hers, and she laughed outright. “Nicky wants me to talk to you about himself. You see, I’ve heard so much about you I don’t really feel strange. Anyway he has an idea I ought to talk to you. He has a sulphurous opinion of your father.”

“No more than my own,” I said. Nicholas walked out of the room, saying he had something to attend to upstairs. Whether he was willing to admit it or not he was evidently in need of other people’s opinions. “He’s changed a lot in the last two years,” I said.

She nodded; now that he was gone she seemed, somehow, more natural.

“Seriously, do you think I’m good for him?”

I found her eyes searching mine.

“Why not ask, is he good for you?”

She shrugged her shoulders, almost wearily: “He’s all I have in the world, you know. Poor old Nicky, he’s so transparently helpless!” She gave me a sudden smile, mischievously, like a little girl. “But don’t you think he needs someone like me to flirt with him? Don’t you really? There’s so much barrenness in him and he’s so awfully moral. Is all that morality of his necessary, David?”

“There was nothing barren about his father. I’ve often wondered where he gets all this.”

“What was his father like?” she asked, quietly.

I told her something of my last conversation with him. When I had finished she was looking into the fire and said, as though with a great effort, “Nicky would never let me meet him. I don’t know why. He didn’t seem to understand what meeting his father would have meant to me. He worshipped him, but somehow or other we didn’t belong together in the same place in Nicky’s mind.”

She began to walk slowly around the room and her eyes ran over the hundreds of books on the shelves.

“He was one of the few people who knew how to handle a book,” I said as I watched her. “He’d never pull one off a shelf. He always pressed in the books on either side of the one he wanted, then drew it out. He’d have been quite a scholar if he’d believed in it.”

“This room does things for me,” she said, still walking slowly about. “Nicky never seemed able to realize it, but he never had any sort of background in my mind at all. Just New York—and communists, and endless arguments.” She stopped. “He wasn’t always bitter, was he?”

“No. He’ll get over it.”

“I hope so. God knows, I hope so.”

Then Nicholas came downstairs and said he was tired, so I left them alone and went out. When I reached home I knew I would not be able to sleep, so I started down the path toward the gardens. With Eisenhardt gone there seemed to be a great gap before me; it was as if I had no one any longer to whom I could talk of things until they were straightened in my mind. The loneliness of the hills tonight was profound. In our own house there was only one light burning; it was in Arina’s room and I could hear a record being played on her imported gramophone. This night, with the music as the final thing, reminded me of the old days I had spent here, and the knowledge that Eisenhardt was dead in the ground and that Nicholas in his house had a naked girl in his arms made everything strange. Those old days seemed very good now.

I stopped and listened. The record had ended and silence passed through the night like a presence. For a few minutes the majestic indifference of the moving world was all and all there was. My nerves had gone limp throughout my body, like slack strings, yet I could not go in or stand still; I had utterly lost the stillness at the core. The needle scratched, then the opening bars of the adagio cavatina from Beethoven’s last quartet floated out through the window, and hearing it I finally became calm. For a moment as the music played it was as though all trouble and frustration had ceased and the desirable dead had profit in a new life, it was as if the whole universe were in the stillness of a perfect balance, the music translating it and making it tolerable.

When the record stopped I went in quietly so as not to let Arina notice me.

10

As the rest of that year dragged on the work in the mill became so depressing that I did as little as possible. Kraus had an absolutely routine mind. He was trying to put me through my paces on schedule and I finally had to tell him that I could no longer stand interviewing desperate salesmen and workers who came to me with long stories about their wives and children. What Kraus called laying men off and what Culver called retrenchment seemed to me as criminal as a lockout.

I felt constantly ashamed of myself. In a small way the mill workers formed an airtight society which we controlled. They depended on us for their jobs, they lived in houses owned either by the company or one of Culver’s banks, they were discharged the moment we could not use them profitably and were evicted if they could not pay their rents. The only time I mentioned this aspect of our activities in the office I got a sour look from Kraus, who muttered that he had enough to worry about trying to make the place pay without having radicals around making more trouble.

Like Nicholas I tried to ease my conscience by overworking. During the weekends I sketched and painted until I was often too tired to stand up. In my working hours, as I had made myself more or less my own boss, I studied the mill from all angles I could find. I discovered that this was the first year since 1914 in which it had not showed a profit, that it was inextricably enmeshed with various of Culver’s other enterprises, and that working conditions for the men, compared to what they should have been, were bad. No one was giving the slightest thought to the labourers. So I set out to devise an amateurish scheme of temporary reform, and for several weeks had the illusion that within a few years I might get control of one of Culver’s factories and become an artist of industry, working the business for the benefit of the whole community of men it employed. This would be impossible during the depression and it would take many years to get it under way, but I remembered Lorbeerstein and thought that if they could do it there, we could do it here. It seemed to me reasonable for Culver to use some of his enormous assets to operate the mill at a loss for the time being, persuade other capitalists to do the same with their own enterprises and so increase purchasing power. Our own mill, I knew, could afford to run at a loss for five years.

This naive idea I presented to Nicholas in a letter and his answer was painful to my vanity. After pages of ridicule, a paragraph abusing my father and an exhortation advising me to find out what Marx really said, he ended: “Just try and do it! Just talk to your father and you’ll find out soon enough how far that Sunday-School stuff will get you!”

Nonetheless I did go to my father with this scheme and he did more than hurt my vanity. He frightened me. He was of course busy when I entered his outer office and I sat for a half hour irritably watching his secretaries and clerks. More and more I was coming to hate white-collar workers. There was not one who worked for Kraus who would trust another out of his sight and those in the head office looked worse, at once more competent and more servile. So I sat studying the portrait of President Hoover that hung on one wall and the signed photograph of Henry Ford that faced it, hating the clerks who seemed to live vicariously on everything and had to derive from my father a sense of their own importance. I went in to see him wishing desperately that I were someone else. I wanted to be painting then, not sweating in an office on an August afternoon. From his windows girls could be seen moving flexible bodies along the sidewalk in the heat, girls in blue, green and yellow dresses that showed their breasts and their thighs as the wind pressed against them.

“Well,” he said and I could see him appraising me as usual. “I’ve read Kraus’s report on you.”

“Yes?”

“Hmmm … Kraus is a sound man. He certainly seems to have handed it to me on the level. What’s been the matter?”

“I didn’t know anything was the matter … not with me anyway.”

He took off his glasses and wiped them, then set them back very precisely.

“What did Kraus say?” I asked.

He stared at me. “He says mainly that you show no enthusiasm. What’s your story?”

“Do you expect me to show any enthusiasm in that place in a year like this?” Somehow I never was able to break openly with him. I wanted to speak otherwise; I wanted to let him know that he and I were on different sides of the fence. But that strange power he had of taking everything for granted, that uncanny ability of being successful, made me talk in his terms. I had to show him I was not a fool by his own standards.

“Do you really know what conditions are like over there?” I said.

“I think so. Don’t you know I go over to inspect that mill once a month?”

I had seen him there only once, six months ago. “How long do you stay when you look things over?” I said.

“Go ahead.” He leaned back in his chair. “Go on. Let’s hear it.”

“Well, for one thing the mill’s in rotten shape.”

“What, the equipment?”

“No, not that. But the whole setup is practically a lockout.”

“Is it any worse than any other mill in the country?” He seemed amused about something. “Go on and tell me more. Maybe you actually are interested after all. Kraus knows steel, but I never did think he could pick men. Tell me about Kraus himself, for that matter.”

I told him about the number of men we had laid off, the lack of orders, the competition, the falling prices and the lack of enthusiasm. I suppose I wanted to let him see that I really knew conditions in his mill, and even at the time I realized that it was giving me pleasure to belittle one of his enterprises. His reply surprised me.

“What you say about lack of enthusiasm is serious. We can’t tolerate that. Some of those men over there apparently think we’re a charity organization. Give me their names and I’ll look into it.”

I stared at him, then became angry. “What good would that do you?” I said.

“Go on,” he said quietly.

“Do you think a society founded on fear is worth having?”

His expression did not change but his voice became harsh and higher. “I never was at a university, David, so maybe you’ll excuse me if I don’t talk like one of your professors. That’s what you sound like right now. What you say about the mill interests me. I knew it all of course, but you showed that you can understand a thing or two. I can use you. I can see that now, and I must admit I’m pleased. But you still have a lot of queer ideas and you’d better get them out of your head. Industry is like the army … discipline, discipline and still more discipline. And don’t come to me with any poor mouth about the starving workmen. If they’d saved their earnings they’d be all right now. Anyway I don’t care a hang what they do or say so long as they do what we tell them. If you have any business suggestions to make, fire away, but don’t come talking to me about socialism.”

This was the longest speech I had ever heard him make. I lit a cigarette and then, irritated with myself for even trying to broach such a subject, laid before him my plan for reviving the mill. I had plenty of figures and statistics and he listened in silence until I was finished. When I stopped talking he pressed a button on his desk. An office boy answered it. Culver looked at me, then at the boy, and said, “Olsen, who do we run our business for?”

The boy scratched his head. “I don’t know, sir. I …”

“I mean,” said Culver quietly, “who meets in the big room across the hall?”

“Oh, I see, sir. Why, the stockholders.” He grinned stupidly and looked from one to the other of us. “Is anything the matter with the room, sir? You told me yesterday …”

“No,” Culver said. “You can go.”

He turned to me and remarked grimly, “Does that answer your question?”

I got up and crossed to the window and he slowly swivelled his chair about to follow me with his eyes. I could see the newsboys shouting on the corner and the crowds pouring past. If the men had saved their wages, if society did not rest on fear, if people trusted each other, if people worked together and shared the dignity of creation. The crowds of people still flowed by.

“Now look here,” I heard Culver’s rasping voice. “You can have a fine position in a year or two. I don’t care about Kraus and what he says. He never could judge men. You understand the business there pretty well for a beginner. But what you’ve got to understand are the real business principles and there’s no reason why you can’t learn. Your idea about running the mill at a loss was well worked out” … he chuckled … “even if it was crazy.” He bit the end off a cigar and spat it into a wastebasket. “Now look at me. I work sixteen hours a day. I can’t remember when I’ve had any real pleasure. Can you show me a workman who can say the same?”

“I think I could,” I muttered. I wanted only to get away now. I was too beaten to think anymore, beaten more by the apprehension of what his world was like than anything. “I don’t see why a workman shouldn’t have a little joy in life … and a little dignity.”

I doubt if he knew what I was talking about and I made no effort to clarify my comment. He was talking freely this afternoon and he went on to point out that during the depression was a good time to fight and fight hard. The company needed only two things and asked nothing more if it got them; it demanded work and loyalty and it wanted to be able to see both. I realized with growing horror that he was thinking entirely of the battle with competitors and was working night and day to create a bigger monopoly. This was the real business, you had to be shrewd, cunning and hard. You had to be a man to stand it.

When the exordium was over his voice quietened and he said, “I guess the rolling mill is a pretty dull place for a beginner after all. I’m thinking of sending you to our refinery near Jersey City … Number One. The head chemist there is a college man, name’s Pigou … Horace Pigou … and he used to be professor at Yale. He’ll like you and there’s no reason why you can’t get along together. You know a good deal of chemistry and you can work in there. You know,” he spoke as if he were revealing a secret, “it’s necessary to hang onto the old concerns, but it’s oil that’s the big thing in this office.”

“I see,” I said, waiting listlessly for him to finish what was on his mind. He apparently had nothing more to say, for he suddenly changed the subject.

“I see our old neighbour, Eisenhardt, is dead.”

“He died two months ago.”

“Hmmmm. How’s your mother?”

“I’ve not seen her for a good while. I’m afraid she’s not particularly well.”

“That’s too bad. She was always delicate. She found life in America different from Russia. Your mother’s a strange woman.”

“I suppose so.”

“Yes,” he said.

A secretary entered and laid a sheaf of papers on his desk. “Proof of that prospectus you asked for, Mr. Culver,” she said.

“Well,” he said to me after glancing at the top sheet, “is there anything you want? Do you want any money? I notice you don’t draw much from your account. You don’t have to be careful, you know.”

“I’d like a month’s vacation,” I said.

He made a note on the pad beside one of the telephones. “That’s all right. I’ll notify Pigou to expect you a month from today. No point in leaving it too long. Get a good rest and start in fresh. Don’t be afraid of doing overtime either. The work’s interesting and that’s the way to get along. Do you want to go any place in particular?”

“Perhaps to Nova Scotia. I’m not very definite.”

He nodded. “I suppose you’ve dropped your painting? You might as well keep it up. It’s a good hobby.”

When I went out and was alone in the crowds in the street I felt ridiculous. It was fantastic to expect that he and I could get along together or that I could ever succeed with him. I had no friends in Pittsburgh and his existence against mine made everything seem paltry and meaningless, and I should have been crying like a lost animal instead of walking along seeing facts and what they meant, seeing them with too much detachment, as though they were of concern to someone else. I wanted to feel and to suffer hotly, not to have my blood frozen by indifference. I envied Nicholas his simplicity. I wished I could believe in some system instead of always seeing the tangent to the circle that people insisted on making as a container for what they called reality.

I walked very fast and soon was sweating from the heat and exercise. Then I remembered that I must pack a suitcase and collect my materials and canvasses; I must notify Arina and Kraus that I was going away; I must see how quickly I could get a train. On second thought I decided not to tell Arina before I left. I didn’t want her in Nova Scotia this time while I was there.

11

The floor of the ocean swung against the continent, thousands of miles of water heavy with salt, and there were no people. Here on the rocks a man could find peace. The Great Glacier had scraped them and they stood bare and enormous on the edge of North America. I looked at their colour and form and felt my mind being cleansed, for the heat went out of it and instead of wanting to defend myself by hating people I felt suddenly humble. These ancient bones of the earth had not altered since man first lifted his forearms and learned to walk. I looked at them and ceased to feel mean. Six thousand years of history and we had conquered this heavy immobility! Why couldn’t even my father look at what men had done and take a God’s-eye view?

No one could identify these formations with his personal emotions or sense a human analogy in the ponderous fluid forms that pressed against them. Smooth surges of water bulged against the granite, their colour that of grey daylight, and with sinuous intricate balance they swung inward, and among them the granites stood like antediluvian monsters. Some, where the water washed, were sleek and smaller, like sea-dwelling mammals, but the quartz glittered in the more massive forms and the backs of these had the hard, scaly gloss of a dry snake. Usually the colours were grey and nordic, but while the sun was setting the whole coast began to glow, not with flame but with a luminous shade of red like the colour of resin wine.

Today there was no colour at all, only the form and process of water. Dulce and algae were sucked to and fro at the water’s edge, and the water washing them looked strong and tannic; but always the ebb swung back to the shifting fog-veils, formless and mysterious and active. A man standing here among these expanses seemed an irrelevancy.

The lighthouse keeper in whose cottage I lived was nearly seventy years old. His hands were gnarled and wrinkled and heavily veined, and the sun and wind and salt had so burned his skin that it was almost as dark as dulce. He had been a fisherman and a sailor, and for the past ten years had tended the light. Like most people here, he saw no beauty in the rocks; I wondered why anyone should have settled on a coast so barren where only small potatoes could be grown and there was so little hay that the cattle had to be sent inland for nourishment in the winter. Yet the old lighthouse keeper was a contented man and he had great faith. He knew the Bible almost by heart.

Sometimes as I painted I remembered what Beati had said about art in a vacuum. Yet the work I was doing here seemed real enough, and the few people I met were real also. The lives of many of these fishermen were dangerous and the little community seemed almost timeless. If all of western civilization collapsed overnight, this section of North America could continue unchanged, because the women would merely bring up their looms from the cellars and weave their own cloth; all other necessities, food and boats and tackle, the men provided even now.

But the scene changed even here. One morning at the end of the second week I found the house shaking on its foundations when I woke and looking out the window I could see the ocean coming in. Already some of the combers were twenty feet high and in the valleys between them foam lay in white fields. Spume smoked inland against the ridge of the land, making the country appear more prehistoric than ever. I dressed quickly looking out the windows all the while at the storm.

“It’s the usual August gale,” the lighthouse keeper’s wife said at breakfast. “It should be a fine day tomorrow, or in a day or two. Then you can get back to work.”

I borrowed a suit of oilskins and spent much of the day walking among the granites. A gusty rain was descending and the wind howled drearily over the barrens and always the roar of the ocean was pervading. I saw a car come slowly down the winding road to the village, now disappearing behind granite tors, now emerging. The sight of the machine enhanced the sense of desolation manyfold.

I had felt heavy winds at home, and once on a vacation from college had been in a small tornado in Florida, but I had never felt such weight in a wind as I felt today. It had blown for two days over the level salt water and now was striking the land like a concrete body, heavy with rain and salt; and walking against it I felt proud and exhilarated, as though it were a contest I were winning. On the land it was all right, but through the wall of rain I could see a Banks schooner sailing down the coast under a jib and reefed mainsail. Even in deep water the seas were going over her, but if she had struck here she would have broken up within twenty minutes and her planks have exploded like kindlings out of the in-going rollers; or they would have shaken loose and hammered the rocks for a while, then have been sucked out on the ebb to float like dead fish in the white field between the waves. Gulls and terns were shooting over the water constantly, hurling their bodies up into the wind like kites, then diving and planing back to the land again with level wings.

For most of that day I walked intoxicated through the storm and in the late afternoon had a cup of tea with the lighthouse keeper, then went to my room and undressed. My face was still stinging with rain and wind and I rubbed myself down thoughtfully, enjoying the laxness after the exercise and liking the feel of my skin as it showed up red under the rough towel. I put on a dressing gown and lay on the bed with a book in my hand. Slowly a drowsiness set in through my whole body, the nerves falling quiet almost one by one as I read, and soon there was no need to hold the book at all. Gradually it neared the floor as my fingers holding it slipped over the edge of the bed, and the wind that blew against the house was blowing through my brain and the terns dove in the wind, crossing each other’s passage each time with greater leisure, each time drawing out a more delicate arc as they swooped, and soon the image of the birds faded and there was nothing but a sense of the blowing wind, of the earth’s envelope moving voluminously past with no odour, and somehow my brain kept whispering that I was not asleep and that sleep was not necessary to perfect this clear-aired tranquility, and then the wind grew louder again and the beams of the house began to creak like a ship’s timbers and I was looking through the open door of my room at a black-haired girl in a claret-coloured jersey who smiled as she saw my eyes open, then flushed and disappeared through the doorway opposite my own.

I sat up abruptly wondering if I had dreamed this. I had thought a storeroom was across the passage, but I could hear the bump of a heavy bag on the floor and at last remembered that the lighthouse keeper had mentioned that a woman would be in the house too for a week. At the instant I woke up and saw her I became aware of a peculiar acceptance of intimacy between us, even though we had not spoken.

Day after day went by, a succession of images filled with the brilliant sunshine: long hours of painting out on the rocks, fishing in open boats and the laconic remarks of the bearded old man whose boat I used; the brilliant twilights when cirrus clouds sailed seaward like flaming ships long after the sun had gone down; evenings in my room in the cottage with lamplight on the nut-coloured walls, and the rafters, laden with fishermen’s oars and a tangled net, a maze of shadows and spiderwebs; a girl’s body diving into the water and swimming about looking tiny beside the gigantic boulders; after dark walking with her when the moving waters all along the coast gave the illusion that the actual earth on which we stood was in motion too, and long after this, late at night, her face picked out by a long finger of moonlight that had entered my room; slowly, hoarsely, the groundswell broke on the shore.

After she had returned to her room the last night of this strange and perfect intimacy between strangers who knew they would never meet again, I looked out the window of the cottage and saw a lantern moving across the rocks; then, very near the cottage, the figure of a man wetting his finger and holding it up to the air to catch the drift of the wind. I glanced at my watch and saw that it was four in the morning. The fishermen were already out to milk the cows, and to test the wind for the coming day.

That afternoon, returning down the province on the train to connect with the Boston steamer, I remembered the man on the rocks, and his immemorial gesture.