Boys and Girls Come Out to Play (3 page)

The sun shone through the Gothic windows; Morgan lay back on the padded seat, his mind in its usual half-drugged state and now irritated and stretched by the loose,
scatterbrained
after-effects of his recent attack. He heard his mother’s and her visitor’s voices suddenly grow louder inside the library; they were coming toward the door; the visitor gave a loud, happy laugh. When the door opened Max Divver came out, red in the face and beaming. Morgan knew him well: he was a husky, swarthy, political writer with hairy hands; he was often spoken of as “the man who shouted at Mussolini.” Morgan greatly respected his physical size and strength, and saw no reason why anyone who looked so impressive should be expected to think too. Now Divver came down the passage with such energy that he had almost passed Morgan before he noticed him and stopped. He put his hands behind his back, surveyed Morgan with a contented smile, and then said,
laughing
: “Well, Jimmy, my boy! How’d you like to come to Poland with me?”

The second bell rang, and the guests began to move into the dining-room.

*

Max Divver’s father had edited a small, liberal, agnostical
newspaper in Des Moines for twenty-five years. He raised his son on the same principles as his editorials: the world, he
believed
, was pinched between good and evil men. Which of the two groups a man joined, Mr. Divver said, depended on each person’s capacity for honest thinking, discipline and
unselfishness
. Hanging somewhere in the no-man’s-land that was neither wholly good nor wholly evil, Mr. Divver recognized people who were merely indifferent or misguided or lazy or plagued with doubts; but he was not very much concerned with them; if they liked his paper, they could buy it;
meanwhile
, he had a job to do. At the age of five, Max was given a text to hang above his bed: THE TRUTH IS MIGHTY AND IT SHALL PREVAIL.

Max came to New York in the middle twenties with more or less the same opinions as his father’s. He spent six months in a post-graduate course at a New York university—and staggered out a changed man. He had fallen victim to devastating revelations, and never again did he experience the pain and misery of those six months.

The revelations concerned Forces and Man. It had never before entered Divver’s head that persons and objects did not have a self-contained existence. Now he discovered—at least, this was the only way he was able to interpret his new lessons without becoming totally confused—that neither he nor anyone had any more independence than prisoners exercising in a yard; they were merely circling spots, compelled by Forces. These Forces were called history, and various other names, and they made old Mr. Divver’s simple groups of black or white souls look as irresponsible as minnows.

If this had been all, Divver might have borne it. But at the same time he discovered that there were not only the omnipotent forces of history outside him, but equally omnipotent ones inside him. Like most boys and girls, he had thought of his mind as a kind of control-tower which did its best to keep his
lusts in order and his limbs in motion, and succeeded moderately well. Now, he found that this was a naïve illusion: his mind had no more influence on him than it had on history: or rather, it did have some influence, but only of a very dishonest kind, called rationalization.

These two revelations embraced a third: that nothing was what it appeared to be, and rarely even that. Persons and things were no more than large or small illustrations of the inside and outside Forces. What was more; as a symbol of the Forces, the person or thing was almost sure to be travelling in the opposite direction to that in which it believed it was heading as a self-controlled incorporation.

These revelations did not settle on Divver’s shoulder like a sequence of doves. He didn’t learn them from his professors or from source-books, although both had much to say about them. He picked them up reluctantly in bits and pieces, because everyone his own age was talking about them, and he was ambitious. The New York students talked in a manner that was strange and cruel to his provincial nature: they seemed to him the most objectionable persons he had ever met. When Divver remarked, modestly but with a certain air, that his father edited the Des Moines
Bugle,
a sneer of elastic spread crossed their faces, as though they had been told that Mr. Divver was a hangman who rode to work on a quaint velocipede. After only a few weeks of classes Divver had learned to be terrified of their intense superciliousness and contempt. They too, they informed him sourly, had high ideals of honesty, and they lost no time in telling Divver that his own ideas of honesty were the wickedest, cheapest forms of self-delusion, invented by the very enemies of society against whom they were fighting. They also made clear that everything that had gone into Divver’s making, and all that he respected and depended on, were parts of a social disease, and that Divver himself was typhoid-Mary disguised as a hick. When Divver
objected, as he did at first, clumsily and angrily, they took him apart with arguments that bewildered him completely, and a certain smile that he came to know well and to dread appeared on their faces. They seemed to use this smile chiefly when Divver tried to strengthen his lonely position by citing some great progressive figure out of American history; after they had smiled, they dismissed the great figure in language so scurrilous that Divver was appalled. If he continued to argue, they were able to recite one incident after another from Divver’s idol’s career, incidents that revealed the man as totally corrupt. At that point Divver always found that he was too badly informed to go on arguing. Often, they went on to discuss Divver’s own attitude to society and progress. They confidently insulted him with phrases that he had never heard before, but soon came to fear far more than charges of being a murderer or a rapist—charges which would, in fact, have entitled him to the students’ sympathy. One student went so far as publicly to describe Divver as a “reformist”—an epithet that resulted in his being ostracized for ten days.

Divver’s hatred of these new acquaintances came out in long, ferocious arguments that he would conduct against them while lying alone in bed: then, he would evoke their unpleasant sneering faces and turn them into messes of blood and smashed bone with his primitive fists. He hated them, especially when their names were Slavic and Jewish: at heart he believed it was intolerable that these sharp, hateful aliens should have been admitted into a country that was progressing well enough in a slow, honest way without them. He had been taught to be proud that his country had opened its doors to millions of immigrants; he did not dare to revise this opinion now, but he would have been overjoyed, secretly, if an epidemic had killed all the latecomers off. He hated them for their lack of respect for his generosity in having admitted them. He hated them for despising his father, his home, his books, his
plain ideas; he hated them for their passionate interest in Europe; he hated them for the doubts they introduced into his way of life, and because they made him realize that he had never tried to think. What was so painful was that these students were unquestionably the most talented people in the class; Divver couldn’t do without them because already he felt contempt for the friendlier students who were like himself.

There was one exception to this. Because Divver was even more frightened of the pugnacious girl radicals than he was of the boys, he confided his fury and desperation to a mild, pretty girl who came from his own State. She soon developed such unshakeable faith in Divver’s Tightness and strength of character that sometimes he actually had to slap her down quite severely and defend his enemies, because her support of him was so uncritical as to make him feel ridiculous. “I’m a very ordinary sort of guy,” he once told her angrily, “and it only discourages me to have you talk as if I had nothing to learn. I have a great deal to learn. Do you think I want to stay just the way I am all my life?” Nonetheless, in spite of his doggedness and half-hearted attempts to learn, Divver continued for another six months in a state of harrowing uncertainty as to whether or not he should abandon his father and go over to his opponents. At last he made what was really a compromise: he left the University, but he married the girl.

When Divver looked back on this marriage, in later life, he could remember scarcely anything about it. It was one of those relationships in which both parties do their best, but one party—in this case, Divver—is left with an uncomfortable sense of shame, that he can escape only by squaring his shoulders and resolutely seeking happiness with another woman. Only five years after the marriage was over he had seen a woman wheeling a baby in Washington Square, and it had been a few moments before he recalled that she had been his wife for two years. He had forgotten the street they had
lived on, what they had done in their spare time; he only remembered in a vague way, and with rather condescending sadness, that he had matured very rapidly during those two years, until he had become too large for the nest.

At the same time as his marriage he began to attend lectures on abnormal psychology. He discovered—it was the happiest discovery of his life—that there were people who were in the same fix as he was; that is to say, honest people who had abandoned their fathers, but who could not bring themselves to go all the way with the Communists. But these people always said—and Divver was soon happy to say the same—that they had a hell of a lot of respect for the Communists, who were hard-working and zealous; and they added that they wished like hell that their own consciences would let them go all the way with such admirable people instead of only permitting them to defend the Communists against ignorant critics and agree with them warmly on certain indisputable issues. These views suited Divver very well, and it was his growth of confidence and his feeling that after all he had a place in New York that perhaps made it hard for him to accept being married to a girl who had not shown the same signs of maturing, either politically or psychologically. But, at the time, the trouble that arose between the two of them expressed itself in a purely personal way.

In the first place, their marriage was the result of feeling that since they were in and out of one another’s apartments so much it would be silly not to arrange things more sensibly. Divver had had to have two bathrobes, one for his place, one for her’s; she had begun by taking over one of his drawers for essential things, and then had gone on to keeping a nightgown and toothbrush there too. Her mother, who knew what was happening, had said hopefully that she supposed on the whole men were more honest these days; to which Divver had said modestly that today honesty was being given a chance for the
first time in history, and that women at last had a chance to practise it. The girl must have agreed, because she found little peculiar, and nothing insulting, in being admitted without wedlock into every last secret of Divver’s puzzled mind—in fact, a strong point in the affection between them was her tender respect for the way he struggled with the idea of not marrying her, and his shame-faced gratitude to her for not pressing him in the matter. Divver used to say repeatedly that he found her attitude miraculous, considering what an ordinary, selfish, egotistical sort of person he was.

Everything went well until, in spite of how hard they both tried, Divver grew more and more ashamed of himself. Each new stage of shame she matched with an assurance of fresh respect for him, until it became like a game in which the shuttlecock was shame when he hit it over the net and respect when she hit it back, but the same shuttlecock all the time. It was an exercise that soon left both of them almost too
exhausted
by shame and respect to go on leading semi-detached lives. “For Christ’s sweet sake, why am I—around like this?” Divver cried one evening after he had drunk too much. “Let’s get together
really,
like civilized people, for God’s sake!”—to which she replied promptly that neither for his sake nor her’s did she want him to take any step that he didn’t really want to take. Perhaps this reply seemed to him to be a reflection on his ability to make up his mind as a man should, because he at once went on to say that lately he had thought the whole business over in a most searching way and could now say with absolute certainty that marriage was what he most wanted. They agreed that a honeymoon would be silly, and though they spent that night together they were too conscious of the gap that deciding to get together had made to do anything but sleep nervously. Divver’s new mother-in-law kissed him warmly, and said that now at last she really knew she was a mother, a remark that made him a little frightened until his
wife said that all mothers felt bound to make it, and that it had no meaning whatever.

They enjoyed waiting for their respective leases to end, and when they took a new apartment they enjoyed fitting it out with their furniture, and boldly tossing out things that they would never have managed to get rid of alone. Divver was impressed, though he felt self-conscious, when his wife bought a reproduction of Rouault’s “Old King” and hung it in the living-room; she said it was like him.

At this time there was some talk about the “freedom” they were to allow each other. But freedom was the last thing Mrs. Divver was interested in (she already felt tired), and Max, who thought he ought to want it, became so domesticated, or demoralized, in the first year of marriage that by the time he did feel the need to come and go in a mature way, he couldn’t bring himself to the point of saying so, much less of doing it. His wife even began to urge him to enjoy freedom, but he insisted that he didn’t need any more than he had and would say so when he did.

The days of matching shame and respect were, of course, far away now; when they looked back on that predicament it seemed completely childish: “though no doubt it was necessary, for psychological reasons that we only now understand,” Max said. Mrs. Divver thankfully forgot all about it until, soon after she began urging her husband to go out more, the old problem came back—in a new form, but an equally honest and painful one. Mrs. Divver saw that although Max seemed to prefer staying in (he was reading a lot) to going out, he was growing moody. Even the hang-dog look of his student days was back. Mrs. Divver asked no questions at first, because she felt uneasy as to what he might reply, and she wanted to go on thinking that everything had been done for the best, carefully, if slowly, in the manner of educated, mature personalities who respect a union based on responsibility not restriction. But at
last he was so depressed and silent that she had to press him to speak openly, which he did.