Neither Five Nor Three (Helen Macinnes) (14 page)

Paul Haydn said quietly to Rona, “We’re going down town in the same direction. Let me know when you want to leave.”

“Thanks, Paul. But Scott said he would call for me. And I’m staying a little longer, anyway.” She faced him frankly. “I want to find out about Nicholas Orpen, to tell the truth.”

“Nicholas Orpen?” repeated Mrs. Burleigh at Rona’s elbow, her hand outstretched for a hearty grip. “That Red? Why he ought to be put up against a stone wall and shot!”

Paul and Rona and Milton Leitner exchanged glances. Bob Cash’s lips tightened.

“He killed my father,” Mrs. Burleigh said. “It only took a few months and Father was worried into his grave.”

“Now, Moira,” her husband said gently.

“
I
know what happened!” she said angrily. “Orpen was discharged because he had too many parents complaining about him. He said he wasn’t a Communist, then! But just a month later, when he wanted to be called a martyr, he admitted he was a Communist all right.”

Everyone looked bewildered except the Burleighs, to whom it all made good sense seemingly.

“Parents complaining about him?” Rona asked faintly. All her fears were surging back. Paul looked at her worriedly.

“Yes. Orpen never seemed to realise that teachers only held jobs because people paid fees for their sons’ education. Once they found their sons were arriving home all raving little Commies from Orpen’s classes, they had something to say about it. After all, they were
paying
Orpen to teach!”

“Now, Moira,” Burleigh said again, “you know this always upsets you.”

“I’d like to meet Orpen some night. With an axe!” Moira Burleigh said as she left.

“Golly!” Edith said. “Wasn’t she
mad
?”

“Lizzie Borden up to date,” Milton Leitner said.

There was a short difficult silence. Everyone was embarrassed by Mrs. Burleigh’s fierce emotion.

“That’s the wrong way to talk,” Milton said gloomily.

“Yes,” Paul said.

Milton looked at him and frowned. “What I meant,” he said in his deliberate way, “is that she helps the Communists.”

“That was what I was thinking,” Paul agreed.

“She’s a very exaggerating kind of person, I think,” Rona said stiffly. “She has some very weird ideas.”

“Sorry about all this,” Peggy said, coming back into the room with Jon. “I’ve never seen Moira so upset. Whatever happened?”

“I mentioned Nicholas Orpen’s name,” Rona said. “That was all.”

“Oh!” Jon said, his bewilderment vanishing. “Nicholas Orpen.”

“I’m sure Moira didn’t really mean what she said,” Peggy said appeasingly.

“She did.” Robert Cash’s voice was unsympathetic. “That’s just the kind of reactionary who is running America.”

“Well,” Peggy said, trying to please everyone, “we’ve got to remember that reaction is inspired by action, isn’t it? If you hit me over the head, Bob, I’m not going to forget it, am I?” She emptied some ashtrays. “Who’s betting on the Yankees this year? Jon, you’ve got to take me to one of their games this spring. I simply must see Yogi Berra, just once.”

“Is he an East Indian?” Edith asked, and raised a storm of laughter. “Well, I know very little about baseball!” she protested.

“He’s only called Yogi because he stands on his head before a game,” Joe said, admiring the blush on her cheek.

“Bobby is sure he does that so as to be light-footed,” Peggy said with a smile. Everything was all right again, no one was going to start any wild arguments. The silly thing about political discussions was that most of the statements were only people’s opinions or people’s guesses. It was ludicrous to watch tempers being lost. If people had to upset their digestions and ruin their sleep, at least let them argue on facts and dates and figures. That was Jon’s way. She glanced with respect and love at her husband.

Jon had been silent in those last few minutes. Milton Leitner noticed it, too. And because he was interested, and felt that Jon could have said much more about Orpen, he wouldn’t let the topic die away. With all a young man’s tenacity, he said, “Professor Tyson, do you know anything about Nicholas Orpen?”

“Why?” asked Jon in surprise.

“I’ve met him. I just wondered.”

Robert Cash looked at his watch. “I’ll have to leave,” he said. “I’ve got a theme to finish tonight.”

Joe Locastro climbed to his feet and pulled Edith up after him. “Time to go, too,” he said. “Edith’s staying with friends away down town, so it’s a long journey. No, don’t worry, Mrs. Tyson! I know the way out. See you soon. And thanks.”

Milton Leitner was smiling as he watched them say goodbye and leave. “Joe’s a good guy,” he said, “but all he’s interested in at the moment is getting married.”

“They’ve more things to talk about than Nicholas Orpen,” Peggy suggested, and the men smiled. “But why did Bob leave so early? He usually stays until one o’clock, and even then he’s arguing all the way down the hall toward the elevator.”

Milton, who had been a good friend of Bob’s for two years now, said nothing. He stared at the rug in front of his feet, conscious that Tyson was watching him. Then he looked up suddenly and said, “I’d like to hear about Nicholas Orpen.”

Paul and Rona were waiting, too. “Well,” Jon said, “I don’t know all the details, actually. And I didn’t hear what Moira Burleigh said tonight to throw you all into such embarrassment. But here are some facts. Back in 1940, there was quite an argument going on, as you may remember. The colleges and universities were full of pickets with placards saying it was all an imperialist war. The students and faculties were deluged with leaflets denouncing warmongers and reactionaries. Speakers were appearing on the campus, haranguing us all not to fight.

“The president of Monroe College—that was Moira Burleigh’s father—had a difficult time of it. He was a New Dealer, and sympathetic to a lot of his young men’s ideas on how to make a better United States. But he saw the war as a war of survival. Most of the faculty agreed with him in principle, although there was the usual division of opinion among them about what should be done. But one small group insisted it was an imperialist war, and attacked the president bitterly. Nicholas Orpen was the leader of that group.

“By the beginning of 1941, there was practically a state of war at Monroe College itself. The president tried to keep it all hushed up, of course—I think he made a big mistake there. For the more he concealed his motives, the more they could be misinterpreted. And then, he lost his temper.

“About Easter, I remember, there were headlines in the papers. ‘College Professor forced to resign. Freedom of speech endangered.’ That kind of thing. I was working on my doctorate at Columbia then, and I was doing some teaching on the side. We were all worried. We didn’t like any attack on freedom of speech. We saw it as a danger that could spread to every university. So we joined in the general criticism against Monroe’s president. Orpen did a bang-up publicity job. He suddenly stated that he was a Communist, and forced the issue. He was hailed as a martyr, and even non-Communists felt a bit guilty about that. Every university and college in the country was arguing about it.

“And then, just two months later, Russia was attacked by her ally Germany. Overnight the pickets and the slogans disappeared from the campus. And Nicholas Orpen, a sacred martyr for two months, suddenly found himself ignored and forgotten. And anyone who did remember him by December of that year, when the Japs attacked Pearl Harbour, only cursed him as another false prophet.”

“What about his Communist friends?” Peggy asked. “Did they abandon him?”

Paul Haydn said, “Why should they? They were caught off-base, too. It’s my bet he was only following orders when he admitted openly that he was a Communist. After the imperialist war became a holy crusade, all he could do was to slide into the background and stay there—until non-Communists had forgotten his speeches. He hasn’t gone around reminding people of his imperialist-war effort, has he?”

“But people don’t forget so easily,” Rona said worriedly. Scott, she was thinking, Scott ought to be warned. Orpen isn’t a friend at all. That kind of man has no real loyalties except to his own purpose. But how could you warn Scott? He obviously believed that if Orpen had made mistakes in the past, then that was a long time ago. Scott was tolerant, Scott was loyal...

Paul was asking her a question. “Don’t they forget?” he said gently.

“We forget too much,” Milton Leitner said bitterly. “Look at the ex-Nazis in Germany and all that ‘pity us’ line they’re handing out. They murdered my grandfather in a gas chamber. They murdered my uncles and all their families.
I
won’t forget.”

“I wish Bob had stayed to hear all this,” Peggy said. “It might have made me seem less stupid when I talked about actions and reactions. You know, if Communists ran a party like any other political party, like Democrats or Republicans or Socialists, all they’d get would be the usual election name-calling. But every time something hidden and secret about them comes to light, they are distrusted more and more. Don’t they see that they get what they earn?”

Jon smiled as he listened. She sounded despairing that educated men should be so blind. Peggy was so sincere, so transparently honest; it was difficult for her to imagine that there were other standards of behaviour in the world among educated men. It wasn’t a matter of blindness; it was a matter of obedience, of letting other men do your thinking for you.

The telephone rang, and Peggy went to answer it. From the hall, she called back softly for Rona. And Rona, rising quickly, said half-worriedly, “That’s probably Scott.” Probably, too, he was going to be late. She glanced at her watch as she left the room.

Milton Leitner said quickly, as only the men were left together, “By the way, you wondered how I met Nicholas Orpen?”

Jon tried to be noncommittal, but Paul Haydn stopped examining
The Witch Cult in Western Europe
, which he had picked up from Jon’s desk.

Leitner said with a smile and a glance over his shoulder at the hall where Rona was now safely telephoning, “It all began right here, in this room.”

“What?” Jon said, sitting up erect and spilling an ashtray.

“Bob Cash and I met Scott Ettley here, you know.”

“What’s this?” asked Jon, worried and annoyed, trying to brush the ash into the rug, picking up the stubs and matches with distaste. “Scott Ettley?”

“Oh, he doesn’t know the score. He’s a decent enough fellow. Some friends are using him, that’s all.”

“How?” Paul Haydn asked crisply. He laid the witchcraft book back on the desk, made a mental note to borrow it as soon as possible, and came forward to take a chair facing Leitner.

“Well, we met Ettley here on a Friday evening, and liked him. He asked us to go and see him—just some fellows and a lot of discussion. That suited Bob and me very well. We went to Ettley’s studio. We had a good time. I met a man called Murray, and he seemed to take an interest in me. All very flattering. A week later, this guy Murray ’phoned to ask Bob and me to go with him to a party on Park Avenue. Sure, we went! A duplex apartment, plenty of food and drink, a lot of people—some famous names here and there, a lot of music and talk and argument.”

“Who was giving the party?” Paul asked.

“A funny old girl with butterflies in her hair. No kidding!”

“Was her first name Thelma?”

“Yes. I never did get her second name quite straight. No one was using it, you see. Everyone just called her Thelma.”

Peggy returned to the room. “Free for all?” Peggy suggested, wishing she had caught the beginning of the story.

“So it was a good party?” Paul asked, but it sounded more of a statement than a question.

“Yes. Bob thought it was first-rate.”

“And you?”

“I guess my new buddy Murray didn’t know that some people don’t like being patronised. He kept handing me a line about his admiration for Jews—as if they were a separate race, just as Hitler said. Then I noticed there was a group, three men and a couple of pretty girls, who were trying to make me feel I was the wittiest guy they’d ever met. I’m not all that good.”

“And Bob Cash meanwhile?” Paul asked. Jon kept silent, his mouth tightening. He made a small gesture to Peggy, who changed her mind about speaking.

“He was getting the same treatment from another little group. They were agreeing with him about the difficulties of being an artist in an economic set-up such as ours. He lapped it up.”

“And then?”

“We were invited next week to another party by some of our new friends. I didn’t know if I wanted to go. There’s just so much butter that I can swallow. But Bob was keen, so I went along with him. I guess if Bob had learned to be more sensitive about his religion, he might have been warned too. But he’s a Christian, and he’s never had to listen for double meanings.”

Peggy looked upset. “Milton, you know it doesn’t matter what religion a man has as long as he is a decent human being.”

“You know it, I know it—but some people don’t,” he said bitterly. “And that applies to my own family, too,” he added harshly. “I’ve a battle on my hands right now. They want us to keep different, and I’m telling them the hell with that, we’re Americans. That’s what we are. Stop building a wall around us, stop emphasising differences, that’s what I keep trying to tell them. And they look at me as if I were some kind of traitor.” He looked at Jon Tyson. “But I’m building no wall, and no one is going to persuade me to do it.”

Rona came into the room, then. She looked pale and unhappy. She sat down very quietly, and lit a cigarette.

“That was the trouble at Orpen’s, you see,” Milton Leitner went on. Rona looked up at him, quickly. She had to strike a second match.

“That was where the party was held this time?” Paul asked.

“Yes. A stag affair. Music, talk. But there was too much damned sympathy for me. Look, tonight, have you been making me feel I was a Jew, and I ought to be sorry for myself, and what kind of system are we living under where discrimination is a settled policy? That was the line I was handed. I left early. And I never went back to any more of those parties.”