The Sea is My Brother (12 page)

“Why didn't you?”

“I met an American girl up there and shacked up with her; she was selling magazines for the Soviet. We came back to New York and holed up in Greenwich Village, and we've been living there since—got married three months ago—I've been in the Merchant Marine for three years now.”

Everhart adjusted his glasses: “What's going to be your next move? Fighting French?”

“This is my next move—the merchant marine. We carry goods to our allies, don't we? We're fighting Fascism just as much as the soldier or sailor.”

“True,” agreed Everhart proudly.

“Of course it's true,” spat Nick savagely.

“What are you going to do after the war?” pursued Bill.

“Après la guerre?” mused Nick sadly. “There'll still be a hell of a lot to fight for. I'm going back to Europe. France maybe. Watch our smoke . . .”

“Well, not to be personal, but what do you intend to do with your life in general?” asked Bill nervously.

Nick look at him blandly.

“Fight for the rights of man,” he said quickly. “What else can one live for?”

Everhart found himself nodding slowly. Nick's blue, searching eyes were on him, eyes, Everhart thought, of the accusing masses, eyes that stirred him slowly to speak his mind by virtue of their calm challenge.

“Well,” he began, “I hope you won't think I'm an old line fool . . . but when I was a kid, seventeen to be exact, I made speeches on Columbus Circle . . . I stood there and spoke to them out of my heart, young and immature and sentimental though it was, and they didn't hear me! You know that as well as I do. They're so ignorant, and in their ignorance, they are so pathetic, so helpless! When the Redbaiters hissed, they smiled at my plight . . .”

“The old story,” interrupted Nick. “That sort of thing won't get us anywhere, you know that! You were doing more harm than good . . .”

“I know that, of course, but you know how it is when you're young . . .”

Nick grinned: “They had my picture all over the hometown front page at sixteen, the scandal of the community, the town radical—and guess what?”

“What?”

“My old lady was pleased! She used to be a hellcat herself, suffragette and all that . . .”

They laughed briefly, and Everhart resumed: “Well, at nineteen I gave it all up, disillusioned beyond recall. I went
around there for awhile snapping at everyone who spoke to me. And slowly I sank all my being into my English studies; I deliberately avoided social studies. As you can imagine, the years went by—my mother died—and whatever social conscience I had in the beginning left me altogether. Like Rhett Butler, I frankly didn't give a damn . . . I ate up literature like a hog—especially Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Chaucer, Keats, and the rest—and left a brilliant enough record to win me an assistant professorship in the university. Whatever social protest I came across in my lectures I treated from a purely objective point of view; in the reading and discussion of Dos Passos a few summers ago, I drew from his works simply from a literary standpoint. By George, where I started by deliberately avoiding Socialism I believe I wound up not particularly interested anyway. Insofar as I was in the university, living a gay enough though fruitless life, I didn't find the need to bother.” Nick was silent.

“But I'll tell you something, those years taught me one lesson, and that was not to trust a lot of things. I always believed in the working class movement, even though I allowed it to slip my mind, but I know now what I didn't believe in all those years, with more unconscious rancor that with conscious hate.” Bill peered eagerly.

“What was that?” asked Nick with cold suspicion.

“Politics for one thing, sheer politics. Politicians survive only if they make certain concessions; if they don't they go out of office. Thus, idealist or not, a politician is always faced with a vexing choice, sooner or later, between justice and survival. This will inevitably serve to mar his ideals, won't it?”

“That sounds natural; what else?”

“A dependence on group . . . I mistrust that, first because it means bending one's mind to a dogmatic group-will. When I say this, I refer not to an economic group where, to my mind, sharing and sharing alike is only natural, and inevitable too. I mean a spiritual group . . . there should be no such thing as a spiritual group; each man to his own spirit, Meade, each man to his own soul.”

“What are you telling me this for?” Nick snapped.

“Because the day may come when the materialistic war you fight on the forces of Fascism and reaction will be won by you and yours—and me, by George. And when that day arrives, when the sharing class will rule, when the rights of man become obvious to all mankind, what will you be left with? Your equal share of the necessities of life?”

Nick's eyes flashed: “You poor dope! Do you mean to tell me a war against Fascism is a purely materializing one, as you say? A war against an ideology that has
burned the books, has conceived a false hierarchy of the human races, has confused human kindness with weakness, has stamped upon all the accumulated cultures of Europe and substituted them with a cult of brutality inconceivable beyond . . .”

“Hold on!” laughed Bill, who, though astonished at Meade's unsuspected erudition, had nonetheless a point to make and would cling to it. “You're not telling me a thing. I want you to pause and think: erase the factor of Fascism, because it doesn't figure in our argument. Fascism is a freak, a perversion, a monster if you wish, that must be destroyed, and will be destroyed. But once that is done, our problems won't be solved; even if we write a satisfactory peace, a peace for the common man, the problem won't be solved. A world where men live in cooperative security is a world where there is no hunger, no want, no fear, and so forth. Men will
share
. . . I'm taking a long-range view of the whole thing . . . men will live in a world of economic equality. But the spirit will still be vexed; you seem to think it won't. Men will still deceive one another, cheat, run away with the other man's wife, rob, murder, rape . . .”

“Oh,” cried Nick mincingly “you're one of those so-called students of human nature.” He turned away.

“Wait! I'm not the retrogressive voice sounding from the pages of the Old Testament. I, too, like you, will deny human frailty as long as I live—will try to cure human nature in the tradition of the Progressive movement. But I don't see a quick and easy way out; I think anti-Fascists live under that delusion. They point to fascism as all of evil, they point to every home grown Fascist by nature as all of evil. They think that by destroying Fascism, they destroy all evil in the world today, where, I believe, they only destroy what may be the last grand concerted evil. When that is done, disorganized individual evil will still be with us . . .”

“Truisms!” spat Nick. “A child would know that!”

“And I more than anyone else, if you will pardon my insufferable vanity . . . but I brought up the subject for one single reason, to point out that being simply anti-Fascist is not enough. You've got to go beyond anti-Fascism, you've got to be more meticulous in your search for a life's purpose.”

“It's purpose enough for anyone in these times,” countered Nick. “You don't know Fascists like I do, I'm afraid.”

“You say,” persisted Bill swiftly, “you live for the rights of man; aren't you supposed to live for life itself? Are the rights of man . . . life?”

“They are to me,” was the icy rejoinder.

“And only a part of life to me,” smiled Bill, “—an important part of life, but not all of life.”

“Do you know what you are?” posed Nick, a good deal annoyed. “you're one of these befuddled, semi-aristocratic ‘intellectuals' who will rave at discussion tables while men starve outside . . .”

“I would not, and incidentally we were assuming regimented injustice had ceased.”

At that, Nick stared squarely into Bill's eyes.

“All right Professor, let's say it has,” Nick proposed.

“What are you left with besides economic . . .”

“I'm left with a world,” interrupted Nick, “where all your blasted theories of this and that can at least be put into action without suppression!”

“Didn't I say Fascism was our more immediate problem?” pressed Bill.

“You did. So what?”

“Then, this later problem, can it be solved with a sword of righteousness or by the spirit itself?”

“This later problem, as you call it, is not important at this particular moment,” Nick rejoined. “Your profound theories don't arrest me in the least . . .”

“Which makes you an iconoclast!” smiled Bill.

“All right, and which makes you a new type of reactionary . . . and a slacker; here, let's drink up the Scotch and argue some other time.” Nick was disgusted.

Bill raised his glass to him: “Well, at least you'll have someone to argue with on this trip. Let's you and I drink to Socialism!”

Nick turned a weary, lidded eye on Bill: “Please don't be a fool . . . I hate Socialists more than I do Capitalists.”

Bill smiled craftily and started to sing: “Arise ye prisoners of starvation, a better world's in birth, for justice thunders . . .”

“That's enough!” interrupted Nick impatiently.

“What's the matter?”

“Let's drink our toasts; but I don't want to sing the
International
in a tavern—it's a drunken insult.”

Bill touched Nick's glass. “Sorry—here's to.”

During this lengthy argument, Wesley had been drinking steadily; almost, it would seem, with a deliberate desire to become intoxicated. Eathington, in the meantime, had found himself someone to talk to in a back booth.

While Everhart and Meade talked on, Mr. Martin returned to Wesley and again spoke to him privately in a low tone.

“She just got in—she says she's comin' right over,” said the old man, gazing anxiously at his son. Both father and son stared fixedly at one another, with the same immobile intensity Everhart had first noticed in Wesley when they had exchanged a long glance in the Broadway bar.

They held their gaze and said nothing for many seconds. Then Wesley shrugged.

“None o' my doin', son,” growled Mr. Martin. “She located me an' told me if you ever came to call her up. She's been in that hotel for two months waitin' for you to pop up. None o' my doin'.”

Wesley refilled his glass: “I know it ain't.”

The old man glared heavily at his son, wiping the bar briefly with a towel. It was not ten thirty; the room had filled up considerably, keeping the waitress busy serving drinks from the bar to the booths.

“Well, it won't do no harm,” added Mr. Martin. “I got some work to do.” He went back to his work solemnly. By this time, a young assistant bartender had arrived, and he now dashed furiously from bottle to mixer, glass to tap as the orders mounted. Mr. Martin, though he moved slowly, succeeded in mixing more drinks and pouring more beers, all of which set swifter pace for the harassed young helper. Music from the nickelodeon played incessantly while the screen door slammed time and again as patrons arrived or
left. The air was close and sticky, though the ceiling fans succeeded in blowing a beery breeze about.

Wesley filled Bill's and Nick's glasses with a morose silence while they launched enthusiastically into a discussion of Russian and French films. He turned to his own drink and threw it down quickly; the Scotch had burned his throat, settled in his stomach, diffusing warmly its potent mystery.

She was coming! He was going to see her again after all these years . . . Edna. His little wife . . .

Wesley lit up a cigarette and inhaled the smoke deeply, bitterly: he could feel the mellow wound in his lungs, the tang in his nostrils as the smoke slipped out in thin double spurts. He blanked the cigarette viciously.

What the hell did she want? Hadn't she fouled up everything enough? A little fool, she was, a crazy one if there ever was . . . and he had married her ten years ago at seventeen, the worse simpleton in town, marrying one of those silly summer tourist's daughters, eloping in a blind drunk.

Well, they had settled down fairly well just the same . . . that flat on James Street with the cute little kitchenette. And his old man had raised his garage salary to thirty bucks, a good job with a cute wife waiting at home. Her wealthy parents had given her up for crazy even though
they sent her a check every month enclosed with notes that suggested they hoped she wasn't living in squalor and filth!

Squalor and filth! Even though he was seventeen, just out of high school, he had had sense enough to take good care of his young wife. It was none of his doing that everything went wrong; Edna, at sixteen, was a wild little cuss. That night at the garage when the hospital called and informed him his wife had been seriously injured in an automobile accident near the New York-Vermont state line . . . was it his fault she went on drunken parties with a bunch of high school kids while he worked his hide off in Charley's garage? Mangled in a smashup with the baby five months along. And the crowning glory of all! . . . her family had her taken to a swanky hospital in New York and that old sonofabitch of an uncle of hers breezing up to the house and starting to raise a row. Charley just pushed him out the door and told him to go run up a tree.

Wesley glanced fondly toward his father who stood shaking a mixer and talking with the customers. Charley Martin, the greatest dad a guy ever had! He pushed Edna's old sonofabitch of an uncle out the door and told him to go run up a tree while Ma bawled and he had sat in the big chair, crushed and stunned by the accident, by the false
accusals, by everything. Charley was the guy who pulled him through that one . . .