Boys and Girls Come Out to Play (2 page)

“Yes, that’s what I think,” said Morgan.

“You pay no attention to the deep anguish Brutus goes through before he murders Cæsar,” said the tutor.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Morgan, throwing down the toothpick. “There’s something about Brutus I don’t like. Anyway, I have a feeling he did it just because everybody else did.”

“Shakespeare does not suggest that at any point,” said the tutor.

“Oh, I know that … No, it just seems to me it’s all too
slick: I don’t believe you go about murdering your best friend or the good of the state. You’ve told me how corrupt they all were, anyway. I’m sure Brutus was too.”

“Mark Antony states very definitely that Brutus murdered Cæsar for completely unselfish reasons,” said the tutor.

“I don’t think that means much,” said Morgan. “You can see what a shyster Antony was in that speech of his, and look at the way he turned out afterwards. I think the whole thing’s just a gangster story; that’s what I like about it. I don’t think there’s any moral to it, and I’m sure that Brutus was a rat. All it does really is make me like Cæsar best.”

“I think you miss so much that’s valuable,” said the tutor sadly, “in not seeing in such a play all the fascinating contrasts and comparisons of Cæsarism, Elizabethanism, and Hitlerism. A whole field of thought would open up to you if you would only start seeing people in relation to basic trends.”

“I keep thinking of the murder,” said Morgan, closing his eyes and blowing out a great sigh of sulky disapproval.

“O.K.,” said the tutor, suddenly struck by a splendid idea. “Let’s do it your way. What would you do if your best friend became a ruthless dictator and you had a chance to murder him, for the sake of millions?”

Morgan sat up atraight with such speed that the tutor gave a jump. A look of horrible slyness came into Morgan’s eyes; he stared at the tutor, his mouth slightly open, with the pleased, malignant look of a naughty schoolboy who has caught his principal in an act of shocking misconduct.

“Why, Mr. Petty,” he said; “you don’t think you’ll catch me in
that
mousetrap, do you?”

“It’s no mousetrap, it’s merely a hypothetical question,” snapped the tutor.

“Well, whatever it is, I’ll wait till it really comes up,” said Morgan. He giggled in an offensive way. “It really is a ridiculous idea, Mr. Petty,” he added.

After Morgan had gone, the tutor sat down and wrote a letter of resignation to Mrs. Morgan. “I assure you,” he explained, “that it is not Jimmy’s health or nervous disorder
per
se
that forces me to give up. It is more the feeling that he has no intention of co-operating; that he obstinately prefers to shut himself up in a private world and admit nothing that does not jive with his preconceived opinions. I hope you will not mind my adding that I feel that from somewhere or other he had got the idea that to learn is something degrading, that the world is filled with dangerous, plotting people whose sole aim in life is to persecute him with dogma and hamper his
individuality
. It would be unfair to call him unfriendly; it would be true to say that he seems to be devoid of any truly
social
response. In fact, I have felt sometimes that he actually gets a certain satisfaction, a morbid pleasure, out of watching the fruitless efforts of those who most desire to help him—as though these people were lunatics or children. I certainly do not mean to suggest that he is a victim of his own sadistic impulses, merely that he does not seem to feel at home with me—” etc., etc.

*

“I do think you ought to feel ashamed of yourself,” said Mrs. Morgan to her son. “Mr. Petty went to enormous trouble for you.”

“I am ashamed.”

“Yes, you should be ashamed—and I mean
really
ashamed, not just ashamed. Why ever do you do it?”

“Oh well, there’s something so puny about him …”

“Heavens, you wouldn’t like me to get you some old-fashioned schoolmaster, with a stick, would you?”

“I don’t know. I might, really. I feel ashamed when Petty gives up because I know I couldn’t have gone on like that with someone I was frightened of. I’m nearly always frightened
when a new man comes, and then when he turns out to be someone ordinary and feeble, I can’t help being relieved, and mean. I’m such a coward, really; that’s what I’m really ashamed of, all the time.”

“Don’t be so silly,” said his mother, frowning indignantly. “You’ve always shown great courage in meeting a terrible handicap.”

“Any dope can do that. What else would one do?”

“Don’t talk that way … Now, I have a lot to do; kiss me, and go for a good walk.”

After the secretary had brought in some papers and they had worked for half an hour, Mrs. Morgan pulled her big spectacles away from her eyes, and asked: “Where did he go?”

“Up Kriss Mountain.”

“I wish he wouldn’t go there. It’s the worst place in the world if anything happens, and everyone knows it’s full of rattlers.” She began to sigh heavily. “I just don’t know what to do. I’ve done everything that’s safe.”

The secretary, who was not long out of Vassar, said what she had been dying to say for weeks. “Perhaps a good
psychiatrist
, Mrs. Morgan …”

“I know that, but what
school
?
I have great respect for Freud, but Jimmy has quite enough to perplex him already. I have a kind of
feeling
… And then there are others who are mystical. Certainly that would do him no good; he’s too full of imagination as it is. Perhaps a good all-round man,” she murmured, picturing at once someone very broad and plump, hung all over with a variety of fraternity keys: “someone like that, perhaps … Or I might send him to that man who believes in electric shocks, but it does make me nervous to think of that. And everything always seems so encouraging
at
first.
Doctors are always so calm; they have such a sense of responsibility: that’s why it’s always so much more discouraging
afterwards,
when they’ve not been able to do anything. I
really don’t know; I’m at my wits’ end. Well, let’s go on … To Mr. Henry Baldwin: Dear Henry, of course I shall be there—I know your rallies, exclamation. Three-fifty a plate seems a little steep to me too, but the Browning always gives good food and service, and some of the best speakers will be there. You can try to get Zilla, but frankly I don’t see why Jugoslavia should come into it. A really good man from one of the unions in the South seems to me the real need: everyone knows Detroit. I can promise you a mention in
next
week’s
Forward
; this week’s has just gone to press. Cordially, as ever, sign Gertrude … And then I think you’d better go to the library, and while you’re there tell Wellcomes that we’ll need at least enough for twenty people on Sunday, and lamb if possible, I mean chops, of course. Oh, and my dear, just a minute; tell Carmichael that the top bar on Jimmy’s window is
not
strong and that he should see to it properly this time, when Jimmy’s out like today, not in … You look tired; are you tired?”

“Just the day of the month, Mrs. Morgan,” said the secretary, smiling with pretty melancholy.

“Oh yes indeed; you expect that; well; just do the library, will you; and, yes, I’m afraid you’ll
have
to do Wellcomes or it’ll be too late: I’ll talk to Carmichael myself: afterwards you go and rest. I think summer is really here at last, don’t you?”

“It looks that way, Mrs. Morgan: all the birds …”

“All the birds, yes, and the grass. Well, you run along and I’ll speak to Carmichael and then you rest.”

*

Mrs. Morgan was the owner and financier of a weekly progressive magazine, but she was not a person who felt guilty about hymning an experimental future from a rooted position. Dignity had been essential to her, even as a child, and she had always known that, given enough money, dignity can be
thrown up around the spender as quickly as a big-top. Her late husband had supplied the money, and long before his death she had gone to work establishing herself in surroundings that gave her confidence. She rightly believed that a fine old establishment can be grown in a few years, that mellow dignity asks only a site that has some old trees: the rest can be done in no time with a good head-gardener, seasoned wood, old bricks in the hands of a nostalgic architect, shipments of well-grown rosebushes and thousands of spring bulbs, some espalier fruit trees for a walled garden, a herbiary, a little toying with a good brook and a rustic bridge for it, plenty of changeable sunlight and shadow, truckloads of gravel, unlimited lawn space, some pigeons and an old bell. Now, twenty years later, her home had not merely such old-time charms as cushioned
bay-windows
and a lozenge-windowed library in which it was impossible to read without electric light, there were also the dividends that greedy, unsentimental Nature pays so readily to the new-rich. Among the heavy shrubs, for instance, which were planted around mossy stretches of lawn, there were already those fortuitous alcoves of shade and silence that seem to the delighted visitor to have grown with the centuries; and birds of every sort, moles and woodchucks swarmed over the grounds in such numbers that they sometimes had to be shot. There had been times when Mrs. Morgan feared that advanced people might find a contradiction between the radical
sympathies
she expressed and the old-fashioned, expensive dignity in which she lived; but everyone seemed to conclude in a generous way that her magazine was the true child of her good heart and mind, and her estate an involuntary inheritance from her rich and backward husband. “I should be every bit as happy, even more happy, in just an apartment in New York,” she often said, to be on the safe side.

The forty lamb chops that the secretary had examined on Friday were for Mrs. Morgan’s first big luncheon of the year.
Every Sunday through the summer, she entertained guests, most of whom came out from New York and spent the day. They might arrive as early as they pleased, but lunch was always set for two o’clock, so that guests who woke with
hangovers
had until midday to grope their way to the train. An open invitation stood for all members of the staff of
Forward,
down as far as assistant editors: typists and other girls were invited singly, by turn. The remaining guests were interesting people.

Between one and two on this particular Sunday, things were going on as usual. Mrs. Morgan was in the library talking to a visitor who wanted to see her privately. Her son was sulkily writing the names of the guests on small cards and placing them around the table in squat, pottery holders. The coloured chauffeur was just driving off to meet the next train from New York. The forty lamb chops were piled up in a heap on the kitchen table. Mrs. Morgan’s father had withdrawn to his bedroom; scarcely any of the guests had ever laid eyes on him.

Outside, in the grounds, the scene held the relaxed but dignified look of a monastery garden. The brook was bubbling and racing with spring rain, and two elderly editors were leaning over the rustic bridge and dropping in twigs. Economists and critics were slowly pacing the lawn, their hands clasped behind their backs, their heads nodding slowly in time with their steps. A literary editor in a tweed jacket and heavy shoes was pointing the stem of his pipe at various shrubs and trees that were new to his companion, a refugee from the Balkans. A group of four were aligned on the old iron seat below the biggest elm: one of them was a Negro columnist from the South, and the other three were putting him at his ease by talking so casually and naturally that he could scarcely understand a word. A few others, devout horticulturists, had gone off to the walled garden to study Mr. Carmichael’s distinguished work. From time to time, out of the poised, amicable
discussions of recent articles, book reviews, defections and political policies, came the hearty, friar’s laugh of the successful intellect taking his ease.

At one forty-five, a coloured maid in uniform crossed from the kitchen door to the old-world garage, and pulled on the old bell. The pigeons shot into the air as spontaneously and frantically as pigeons have done for thousands of years; the enthusiasts in the walled garden looked at their grubby hands and began to wander toward the house. The big Cadillac swept up the gravelled driveway and deposited the last of the guests, who were greeted with cries of happy surprise. It was fifteen minutes to lunch.

Morgan was sitting in the panelled passageway that ran between the library and the living room. The guests, coming in to wash, greeted him as warmly as ever, calling him Jimmy and giving him a friendly smile. They knew about his illness and felt sorry for him, and always fell into the tact and
bluffness
of sympathetic doctors. Sometimes they stopped to talk to him, choosing their words carefully and speaking distinctly. He divided their remarks into two categories: those he despaired of ever being brilliant enough to say himself, and those which he knew he would never be stupid enough to say himself. He had been frightened of most of the guests, until he found that all of them were frightened of his mother; after which he classed most of them with his tutors. He also often felt deep contempt for his mother, who blundered along in a very unintellectual way during luncheon talks; but he admired her for caring so little about her gaffes, and despised her sycophants for being too frightened to jump on her. He knew by now that she ran the machine, that she knew when to be persuaded and by whom; that she knew what power she held and used it fully; that the magazine was her way of making her life race along in a productive way and its contributors the clowns who protected her from boredom. Morgan rarely
read the articles they wrote, but he always read with envy the short biographical notes that accompanied their articles, and wondered at the magic wand that changed the unprepossessing man-in-the-flesh into the kingly man-in-print. “Thomas Swayne is a young Vermonter whose first novel,
Saga
for
John,
a study of the interior conflicts of a young rebel who finds himself bitterly at odds with his environment, was published last Fall. He is now at work on a critical study of Leonardo da Vinci.” “Herman Dimbeck teaches Restoration Drama at White River College.” “Arthur Riker has spent the last ten years in extensive study of the Swiss cantonment system. His forthcoming book is called
The
Land
of
William
Tell.”