The Accursed (26 page)
Willy, staring into her teacup, could not reply. Josiah saw her face color with warmth. He said:
“There should be a kind of ‘free love’—as the revolutionaries say—for those who are fearful of marriage. Or better yet, a way for a woman to live her life without either—‘free love’ or ‘marriage’—but just as an individual, as a man might live, undefined by the opposite sex.”
“Yes. That is so.” Willy paused thoughtfully, biting her lower lip. “But Annabel was not ready for such a life, no more than I am, really. Though I’m closer to it than Annabel could have been. To live freely, as the suffragettes argue, a woman must be self-sufficient, financially. She must have decent
work,
and a decent
income.
Neither Annabel nor I have this—yet.”
“Annabel was brought up to be
wed
. You, I think, are different—you are almost of a newer generation.”
“How I wish that that were true! But I will try.”
“People say you want to live in New York. You should, somehow. Princeton is not the place for you, right now.”
“It is churchly humbug here, isn’t it? And such good, kindly, Christian people, whom we love, and whom it would hurt to leave.”
“Well, Annabel has left. By this time, I should think that she might have returned if she’d wanted to.”
Willy said, in a lowered voice, “If Annabel has cast her life here aside, even if she has made a mistake, shouldn’t she be allowed her freedom? Her freedom even to be made miserable?”
“I would kill the son of a bitch, if he made Annabel miserable. If I could find him, and get hold of him.”
A roaring in Josiah’s ears, and a hot flush in his face. It was made very obvious to him, he and Wilhelmina Slade were alone together, in this room; had they not the freedom to do what they wished, even to be made miserable? And what delight, in such freedom.
“I suppose we’re all selfish, as I know I am, Josiah. I want Annabel back with us, where we know she’s safe.”
“How could we ever believe that, again—‘safe’!”
“Or maybe the truth is, Annabel didn’t ‘choose’—she was the victim of a sort of spell, like hypnosis or mesmerism. That is what most people think, and what I would prefer to think.”
“It’s what I think—what I prefer to think. And if I can find the man, I will make him pay. For my sister’s situation calls for rescue, and for revenge, even if she herself does not.”
In such emotion, as if he had no idea what he did, Josiah seized Willy by the elbow, and lifted her to him and kissed her mouth, wetly. Then stepped back from her, the heartbeat in his chest so wild, he felt that he might faint; only fresh air could help.
Kissed by Josiah Slade, even in so distracted a way, Willy could not seem to respond; then, as Josiah left the room, she followed after him, daring to pluck at his arm. “Josiah!—my friend. Will I see you again?”
“Yes. Yes of course. You will see me again—many times. Good-bye!”
Josiah stammered, eager to escape. A few minutes later, striding along Campbelton Road in the direction of Elm Road, he could recall of the heated emotional exchange only the admonition
Shouldn’t she be allowed her freedom? Her freedom even to be made miserable?
“GOD’S CREATION AS VIEWED FROM THE EVOLUTIONARY HYPOTHESIS”
T
his is the intriguing title of Winslow Slade’s sermon, delivered at the Germantown Unitarian Church just outside Philadelphia, on October 19, 1905; the last such public appearance the renowned former minister was to make in his lifetime.
Through the lengthy, humid summer, Winslow Slade had virtually hidden away in his library at Crosswicks, in a paralysis of grief and (it may have been) shame, following the loss, as he called it, of his beloved Annabel. Unlike Josiah, and most of the Slades, Winslow shrank from speaking of the situation; he showed so little animation at the prospect of locating Annabel, bringing her back, “revenging” her honor, you would almost think that he’d given her up—the “loss” was irrevocable, and out of human hands.
When his daughter-in-law Henrietta burst into tears in his presence, as several times the poor bereft mother did, Winslow allowed others to comfort her, and quietly excused himself, and left the room to return to the sanctuary of his library.
In the autumn, Winslow roused himself, to a degree, to accept an invitation from Colonel Harvey to write an essay for
Harper’s
on the delicate subject of the “popular preaching” of the day, and its danger to the stability of a more mature faith; he accepted invitations to give guest sermons here and there in Jersey, and, most successfully, at the Germantown Unitarian Church in an affluent Philadelphia suburb, on “God’s Creation as Viewed from the Evolutionary Hypothesis.” So many admiring faces, so many heartfelt handshakes!—reminiscences of Dr. Slade’s many years as a Presbyterian minister, and president of Princeton University, and governor of New Jersey—and much else, that Winslow Slade had nearly forgotten, as if it had been the effort of another man, a stranger to him. If there were murmurs behind his back of the
terrible scandal
in his family, these were tactfully hidden from him, and may have provoked a greater sympathy for him among his hosts.
What a good, saintly man! And what a cross to bear, in his twilight years.
For weeks Winslow had worked on “God’s Creation”—he’d never been a minister who avoided intellectual issues, or who glossed over scientific challenges to faith; for weeks, he’d consulted books and journals from his library, and newer material, from Chancellor Green Library, which he’d quite enjoyed visiting, in a pretense of being a young, curious scholar once again. He’d discussed his talk with his grandson Josiah who seemed to be, among Winslow’s relatives, the only one familiar with what Christian theologians called the “evolutionary hypothesis,” but their discussions proved contentious, and upsetting: Josiah claimed that the view of Darwin’s theories which Winslow was presenting was “so simplistic as to be erroneous,” and that Winslow’s willingness even to consider the theory, advanced by numerous theologians, that the Devil had scattered false fossils to undermine faith in the Biblical creation, was “absurd.” Most upsetting, Josiah suggested that his grandfather really didn’t understand Darwin’s basic concepts of survival of the fittest and survival by natural selection—“It is all random, Grandfather: there is no ‘creation’ at all.”
“Josiah, of course there is a ‘creation’! Look at the world—the world is
there
.”
“But the world, all worlds, are ‘accidents.’ I think that is what Darwin meant.”
“Darwin could not possibly mean that there is no
design
. Without design, there would be chaos.”
“Well, I think the theory is: out of ‘chaos’ arises something that resembles ‘design.’ But it’s all random.”
Winslow, usually soft-spoken and courteous, even with very stupid people, was beginning to lose patience now with his arrogant grandson: “But Josiah, how is that possible?”
“Grandfather, how do I know? I’m not a biologist, a geologist, or a geneticist! I’m trying to be a rational person, amid a most irrational world.”
“It is not ‘rational’ to think that our world, humanity itself, might have evolved out of—nothingness. It is only rational to conclude that if there is a creation, there is a Creator. If you discovered a complex Swiss watch cast away on a beach—”
Josiah interrupted: “But there is no ‘creation,’ Grandfather. You are trapped in your theistic vocabulary.”
Now angrily, Winslow persisted: “—a Swiss watch cast away on a beach, and you would conclude that the watch ‘evolved’ by itself? That there was no watch-maker, and no creation?”
“It isn’t the same thing, Grandfather. One is a biological phenomenon, and the other is an ‘invention.’ It’s a foolish argument. Of course, there is an inventor, and there is a manufacturer, of a watch! A watch does not reproduce itself.”
But Winslow seemed not to understand, doggedly returning to the thesis of his sermon: “The existence of so complex a mechanism proves a ‘Creator’—so too, our complex species, and the vast world . . .”
“Grandfather, no: given the astonishing variety and processes of the world, and so much that goes horrifically wrong in the world, it is more rational to assume that there is no ‘Creator’—it is all an accident, and we must try to understand it.”
“Never! I can never believe that the world is an ‘accident’ and not a ‘creation.’ And the people to whom I will be speaking, who have faith in our teachings, will never believe, either.”
Winslow spoke hotly, furiously. His usually affable eyes shone with rage. Josiah had never seen his grandfather in such a state and felt immediate regret, for what was the practical purpose of such a discussion? The older generation must believe what it must believe, Josiah thought. Younger generations will supplant their elders, and feel pity for their ignorance which they were proud to call “faith.”
*
With a mumbled apology Josiah excused himself, and slipped out of his grandfather’s study.
They were never to discuss the subject again.
He is trapped, like a butterfly in a jar. So long as the oxygen remains in the jar, he can survive. But no longer.
AS IF TO REFUTE
Josiah, and what Winslow Slade called, in his sermon, the
younger generation of quasi-rationalists,
the Germantown congregation was very receptive to his ideas, and to their expression in a form in which the youngest listener, as well as the least educated, might understand; the essence of the sermon was that “faith” and “science” inhabit totally different spheres, and do not overlap, even to share the same vocabulary. There was no applause in the beautiful old church, as there would have been in a lecture hall, but the Unitarian minister and his company were enormously pleased with the sermon; and numberless people came up to Winslow Slade afterward to shake his hand, with the praise that he had explained their own beliefs to them, in a way they could not themselves.
How very good it felt, or should have felt, to bask once again in such public adulation! And in the cause of defending the Christian faith, against atheism. But Winslow was feeling tired, and mildly anxious, as the elderly are likely to feel, when some distance from home; and so he excused himself before the elegant luncheon at a church member’s house had ended, saying that he had to make a 2 p.m. train.
On the return to Princeton, Winslow could not keep his eyes from drooping; he could not concentrate on the book he’d hoped to read, the newly published
The Life of Reason
by George Santayana, of the Philosophy Department at Harvard. In a light doze in his private compartment on the train Winslow woke abruptly to stare out the window at a creature of some sort—a horse? a deer?—running and stumbling alongside the speeding vehicle—seeing then to his astonishment that the figure was human, and wraith-like. Why, it was Annabel!—his beloved granddaughter Annabel!—running barefoot in the rough terrain, thin bare arms pitifully extended to him; her long tresses blown wild, and her fair, childlike face wildly contorted.
Grandfather! Help me! Don’t abandon me! Intercede with your God for me!
—even as the train seemed to be gathering speed, and pulling away; and Annabel was left behind, staggering desperately through the sere and tangled grasses beyond the railroad bed.
So noisy was the train’s clattering, no one heard the elderly man’s cries of horror, and for help. No one was to discover him collapsed on the floor of his compartment, half his face contorted in a look of terror, and his eyes rolled back inside his head, until a conductor slid open the door, at Princeton Junction.
M
an’s belly is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god.
This curt aphorism of Nietzsche had a special meaning for Upton Sinclair this autumn: not because, like billions of impoverished beings throughout the world, he suffered from daily hunger; nor, certainly, because he over-indulged in rich foods. Upton’s peculiar condition was a lack of appetite, or, even, at times, a revulsion for food; he was rarely “hungry” in the usual sense of the word and, after forcing himself to eat a meal, often writhed in silent agony as if the acids of his digestive system were in turmoil.
How mysterious his predicament was, and how unjust, that he of all persons should be so afflicted!—when he religiously adhered to the tenets of vegetarianism, avoiding not only meat and poultry but fish; and kept to a rigorous asceticism, working for as long as fifteen hours a day at his desk, and denying himself all but heated skim milk when he felt light-headed. It was Upton’s theory that fasting would stimulate him to sustained feats of prose, as he believed it had others; hadn’t Balzac labored at his desk for as long as thirty hours at a stretch?—and Upton Sinclair believed himself to be cleaner, healthier, and more ascetic in his habits than Balzac, and more selflessly dedicated to his ideal.
Meta worried that Upton was making himself “anemic”—and generally ill—but the young author replied that children as young as six toiled all night before burning furnaces in the Allegheny steel country; and his work, set beside theirs, was light indeed. “I don’t want to spoil myself, and grow lazy,” Upton said, “when the Revolution will need all the strength we can provide it.”
“But you aren’t ‘lazy,’ Upton—of course you are not. And you don’t eat much, as it is, and are very thin.”
“Not so thin as others are!” Upton retorted. (Though secretly he felt a little distress, that he could not seem to gain weight, but only to lose it; that, after eating the most mild of foods, like unsalted and unsweetened porridge, a single boiled egg, a bowl of warm milk in which bread had been soaked, he experienced a stoic and silent sort of pain in his stomach. And he felt most grievously sorry, that, as a consequence of the asceticism he imposed upon his little family, his son David had developed rickets, according to the diagnosis of a stern-faced Princeton doctor.)
Meta would never forgive him for that, he feared—the puny bone-development of little David.
Yet it was difficult for her to argue with Upton, who retreated as always to his Socialist beliefs. He was convinced that the ulcerous condition of his stomach and the over-sensitivity of his nerves were mere symptoms, the cause of which was finance capitalism: the “mighty fortress of Greed” which he and his Socialist comrades detected on all sides in the United States of the early 1900s.
“In so sick a society,” Upton said to Meta, “how is it possible that anyone is healthy, at all?”
But this riposte was too precious to fling away without recording it, that night, in his journal.
In so sick a society as ours how is it possible that any citizen is healthy, at all?
IN THE RELATIVELY
less stressful era before Meta’s “suicide attempt” the young couple often went strolling of an evening, with their infant son carried in a sort of Eskimo-backpack, strapped to Upton; as the countryside was less hospitable to strollers than the village of Princeton, its private lands being marked by no trespassing signs every one hundred yards or so, Upton and Meta walked in town, and on the Princeton University campus; so idyllic a setting, Upton observed, yet so much a bastion of privilege, it could make him physically ill if he allowed himself to dwell upon it. Hastily then, Meta directed him away, to Alexander Road; where, at the little stone train depot, Upton was inspired to speak of all that the “monopolistic” railroads had done to American citizens; and to tell her, and any others who chanced to overhear, on the railway platform, that the forcible Revolution must be made, if the peaceful transition failed. Gripping Meta’s slender arm tightly he quoted one of his favorite passages from
Zarathustra:
“ ‘Behold, the pale criminal has nodded: out of his eyes speaks the great contempt.
My ego is something that shall be overcome: my ego is to me
the great contempt of man—
that is what the pale criminal’s eyes say.’ ”
Meta listened courteously, as Meta usually did; but Meta did not seem to comprehend.
“Nietzsche speaks in riddles, Meta. Yet, if you have the key, his words aren’t riddles but crystal-clear. I am a pacifist, as you know—but—what prophecy! There will one day be gunfire, and bombs, and high-leaping flames, and cries in the streets, if the worshippers of Mammon don’t heed our warnings.”
“It will be the U.S. Army that fires upon the Revolutionaries, I’m afraid. Or Pinkerton’s, as they’ve done at the strikes.” —So Meta murmured, in an unassertive voice.
Taking little heed of his wife, except that he required her as an attentive listener, Upton led her from the platform onto the graveled railroad bed, as no train was imminent; and onto the dully gleaming rails and wooden ties. He spoke of the old fascination the railroad had exerted upon him since boyhood: the railway cars, the steam locomotives, the monsters of iron and steel and speed and romance—that same romance the contemptible J. P. Morgan and his Railroad Trust tried to exploit in the name of greed. Upton did love the railroad, he confessed, by which he meant the machinery itself, and the sheer wonder of it—the pride, the great noise, the happy sight of thick black smoke curving backward; the “melancholy music” of its calls in the night; the whistle, the clattering of wheels, the deafening roar, the marvelous O of the locomotive’s boiler face.
“When Jack London and I meet, and we two must meet, I will ply him with questions about ‘riding the rail,’ as I know he has done such things. I will ask if he has ever witnessed a railroad accident—they are terrible to behold, it’s said. It’s all bound up,” Upton said excitedly, “with the New Brotherhood of Man, as it is wrested from the Old Tyranny. For how could it be otherwise, in the dialectical history of the class struggle? Life is a simple and clearly defined
evolutionary process
in which the strong overcome the weak, and are in turn overcome by the yet stronger; and so entire species may pass away into extinction. The old way of belief—that God ‘created’ the heavens and the earth and all that dwell on the earth—has been thoroughly refuted by Darwin and Nietzsche and their followers; now, we look to Marx, and Kropotkin, and Bakunin as our visionaries—and Jack London.”
Upton went on to speak of the role of “chance” in the dialectic process; the way in which, for instance, President McKinley was killed by the assassin Czolgosz, who’d functioned unwittingly as an agent of historical necessity, though the world dismissed him as a rabid anarchist-madman. And with McKinley’s sudden death, the elevation of Roosevelt to the presidency. “By such ‘chance’ history is altered forever,” Upton said, “and it can’t be an accident that
The Jungle
is appearing now, during Roosevelt’s administration. For there is much more likelihood that Roosevelt will take note of it, than McKinley.”
Meta may have smiled to herself, at the possibility of her young, unprepossessing husband, invited to the White House to discuss his exposé of the Chicago stockyards.
“For isn’t the artist by nature a revolutionary?”
Meta concurred,
yes.
As there can be no social progress without genius, Upton continued, so there is no genius without social progress. “Thought is power, as Victor Hugo believed; and God creates art by way of man. So, God continues to add poets of genius to the world when the needs of progress require, and if the Revolution brings violence, even of a monstrous sort, why then the poet must be in the service of
monstrousness.”
Meta murmured gently, “But do you believe in ‘God,’ Upton? I’d thought you had said we should not, any longer.”
“Of course I don’t believe in ‘God’ in the old, discredited way,” Upton said, “but as ‘God’ in a kind of dialectical history. Though I am a pacifist, as I am a vegetarian and a teetotaler, yet it gives me a sort of thrill to consider what
monstrousness
the Revolution may bring forth. A new breed of humankind, perhaps; a new morality—‘Beyond good and evil,’ as Nietzsche has said.”
“Like the French Revolution?” Meta shivered. “The guillotine—how horrible it seems to me. And so many revolutionaries were beheaded by it.”
“
Not
like the French Revolution, Meta,” Upton said, with exasperated patience. “This is an entirely new sort of Revolution, which our Socialist comrades have worked out. It will involve a ‘crash’ of the bourgeoisie—of capitalism. Think of a railroad accident—the wild exhilaration of such drama—for here we have the image of all that’s most powerful brought to a sudden stop; the virile forward-motion arrested; the brute strength stymied; the billowing black smoke of the locomotive stilled; the complacent passengers in their private Pullman cars, with every sort of luxurious accouterment, thrown through the smashed windows, and broken in body and spirit, their blood draining into the common earth. What remorse then, when it’s too late—what terror at the destruction of vanities! The mighty engine overturned, flames billowing forth, and oily black smoke—panicked cries and screams—mangled faces, bodies like those of wounded snakes, impaled frogs—godly steel corrugated as if it were cardboard. What power has the Railroad Trust
now
?”
Upton was speaking with such passion, Meta had to pluck at his wrist, to quiet him; for individuals on the platform were listening, very curiously. And Upton fell silent, abashed. For in the next seconds there came along the track the three-car shuttle called, by locals, the Dinky, making its way from Princeton Junction to the village of Princeton, its thin perky smoke puffing upward. Upton Sinclair hurriedly scrambled out of the railroad bed and up onto the platform, helping his wife beside him; he would have stayed to watch the half-dozen passengers climb onto the little train, with a kind of envy, had not Meta, hugging her cotton shawl close about her, murmured: “Upton, please—I want only to go home now.”
THE FOLLOWING WEEK,
Upton discovered his wife seated at their bare kitchen table, late at night; the barrel of the ugly revolver held against her forehead, and her finger pressed tremulously against the trigger. (Upton had never fired a gun, and had no idea how hard one must press the trigger; the prospect would have terrified him.) He’d wakened to find Meta slipped from their bed; he’d lighted a candle, to search for her; not wanting to call for her, for fear of waking little David, and provoking an onslaught of ear-splitting wails.
It was a hellish sight—seeing Meta in the kitchen, beside a sullenly burning kerosene lamp. Yet further distressing was the fact that, in surrendering the weapon to him, Meta wept bitter tears saying how she detested herself as a bad mother, and lacked courage to do what God had whispered to her, to do.
“God would not ask of you such a cruel thing,” Upton protested, “even the Old Testament God of wrath.”
For weeks afterward Upton was haunted by his wife’s piteous words, and couldn’t think how he deserved to hear them. Had he not been a devoted husband and father, despite their frugal circumstances?
Did his wife not realize that he loved her, despite his commitment to the Socialist cause? “Yet it seems, for a woman, this isn’t enough.”
In his journal noting, for posterity
The Revolutionary must not marry, no more than the martyr.
A POISON HAD SEEPED
into their marriage, if not into their very souls, since their arrival in Princeton and the “rural experiment” on the old farm on Rosedale Road: but the young author could not determine what this poison was.
Could it be a poison of
place
? Or, less clearly, of
time
?
For this part of New Jersey was quite beautiful, and Princeton an idyllic town lacking the ugliness of most towns. Upton had remarked in letters to his Socialist comrades how there appeared to be, in public at least, no “poor” people; certainly, no beggars; even the Negro house servants and laborers were respectably dressed, and lived in a respectable residential neighborhood on lower Witherspoon Street one might mistake for a “white” neighborhood. Yet, there seemed to Upton a kind of free-floating
poison
. . . Where once his young wife had doted on him and his writing, detecting in even his dashed-off pieces for the New York papers evidence of genius, she now showed but a perfunctory interest, and seemed scarcely to care that
The Jungle
was selling out every issue of
Appeal to Reason
in which it appeared. (“Since you are only being paid the usual rate by the magazine, it hardly makes any difference if the issues are ‘best sellers.’ We’re still poor”—so Meta pointed out with cruel accuracy and not at all the kind of sympathy a man might expect from a loyal wife.) It had been their custom for Upton to give his wife reading matter to study by kerosene lamp in the evening, so that they could discuss the pieces together; but by degrees Meta had lost interest, and even lost the material—which included Upton’s own “The Scientific Basis of Utopia,” which he planned to present at the first meeting of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society that summer.
A terrible thought came to Upton: could his wife be in love with another man?
Or, at least, seeing another man in secret?
So the unhappy husband tormented himself while hunched over his writing table in his sacred work-place in the little cabin behind the farmhouse.
This autumn, since the murder of the Spags girl not many miles away, and a rumor of other, “unspeakable” crimes in the vicinity, Meta had set out on solitary walks as if in defiance of circumstances; several times she declared she was “not fearful” as other women were; for it was crucial to her, to slip away from little David, when she could, to be alone with her thoughts and in no danger of being interrupted. At such times the frail young woman exhibited a remarkable, if not febrile energy, and could walk long distances—at least two miles into town, and back; or, in the woods and fields behind the farmhouse, an incalculable distance. She walked on Province Line Road and on Carter and Poe roads, in the area of Stony Brook Creek, as well as along Rosedale; by chance, Upton learned that she’d walked as far as Pretty Brook Road, that ran parallel with Rosedale, on the farther side of the creek. Sometimes, Meta dared to walk in Crosswicks Forest, though the land was prominently posted against “trespassers” of any sort; she returned with muddied shoes, as if she’d been tramping in a bog. And when she returned from an illicit walk, having failed to inform Upton that she was leaving the house, she was likely to be scant of breath, sunburnt, her clothing torn by brambles and her hair disheveled. “Meta, where have you been?” Upton would ask, disapproving; for after all, he’d had to interrupt his work, to take care of the baby. And Meta would say only vaguely that she’d been “on a walk—and lost track of time.”