Jean Toomer, "York Beach" (1929) (full text)
York Beach
CHAPTER I
ACCORDING TO Nathan Antrum's philosophy, the pattern of his life
led him through alternating phases of apparent fulfilment and
apparent nonfulfilment. Sometimes the gifts of earth and of his
fellow men more or less corresponded to his inner state; and at
such times it was as if his active wishes had found and merged
with their objects. At other times the substance of the exterior
world seemed fragmentary, insufficient: its various forms and forces
did no more than stimulate wishes and cause them to intensify
themselves and grow more intense the more they manifested with-
out tangible means of satisfaction. When in this latter state, Antrum
moved about, his wishes so intense that they formed a world, a
world of sheer wish-force, this world so over-reaching and out-
leaping the objects round about him that it seemed with sufficient
force to free itself from earth and rise to a more perfect planet.
Knowing that both phases were necessary, the one, permitting
him to dwell on earth, the other, compelling him to seek and ascend
towards superior fulfilment, he affirmed both.
In phases of apparent satisfaction, he felt himself vividly par-
ticipating in earth-existence, his efforts giving rise to evident pro-
portionate results, life yielding its meanings as ripe fruit yields to
the touch. In phases of apparent nonsatisfaction, he experienced
what the ancients called divine discontent, or, if it were positive,
aspiration.
Once, when talking of these things with a friend, an astute but
imaginative young person familiar with the ideas and terms of
modern psychology, this friend had told him:
"My dear Antrum, you surprise me. No, you annoy me. You are
an anachronism. You should have been born, preferably before
Luther, certainly before Watson. Only souls can aspire, and souls
belonged to ancient and medieval fools. We've done with them.
We've done with terms like 'divine discontent' and 'aspiration'.
They still hang on in museums of religion, that is, in churches.
But they have no meaning in contemporary life. You know as well
as I do that they were used by men who assumed the existence of
a 'spirit'. We've done with spirits. Let's have done with their brood
of terms. And when you speak of fulfilment and nonfulfilment, you
really mean, don't you, adjustment and maladjustment, or some-
thing like that?”
And then he had seen a look in Antrum's eyes which made him
quickly modify his tone and add: "Well, of course. Perhaps you
are not an anachronism. I admit that you know as much of modern
thought as I do. Perhaps you merely sound like one because you
use archaic words. But why not bring one's vocabulary up to date?”
Antrum had nodded thanks to his cocksure young friend. And
then he had started to remind him that, in the first place, a change
of terms did not necessarily imply an increased knowledge of
reality; that the existence of the body, like the existence of the
soul, was a matter of belief, not a matter which men could prove;
and that, in the third place, the main ideas, the main attitudes of
modern psychology were as ancient as the main ideas and attitudes
of religion, both having existed and having been argued by opposing
schools of men, to no result, before the Christian era. But, realizing
that should he do so, he would not only start a repetition of the
futile controversy, but would provide opportunity for his essentially
naïve young friend to feel the illusion of a purposive and fruitful
contest, he decided, instead, to give Albert a real taste of what he,
Albert, believed he believed.
"In truth, dear Albert, wise counsellor and cocksure young man,
I should also discard talk of 'alternating phases', 'wishes', and so on.
For, when examined, what are these but terms I conveniently give
to phenomena I do not understand and which may not exist?
These are terms I use to fortify my assumption that the given
phenomenon does exist and that I understand it. It is an empty
business, dear Albert. I rely on my senses and on my mind, both
of which are blind alleys. Yes? I appear to see something. I seem
to think about this something. I assume that I more or less under-
stand it. But, at best, what is it I really do? No more than associate
my meanings with my terms. I assume that I understand the mean-
ings I have given the terms. And then I induce myself to believe
that these terms fit objects, or approximate realities, which exist in
the objective world, my own organism being part of this objective
world.
"It is an empty game we play with ourselves. We put ten pen-
nies in a hat. We turn our heads and say: a hat is that which con-
tains ten pennies. We rediscover the hat, and find that in fact it
does contain ten pennies. Hurrah! We understand the hat. Ancient
men understood ancient hats. Modern men understand modern
hats. If asked: what are ten pennies? We answer: ten pennies are
those things which are found in a hat. Sure enough they are just
that!
"Much as I understand a hat, I understand myself. Much as I
understand myself, I understand you, Albert, other men, Nature,
and the Universe. It is a game which appears to work if we do not
examine it. If we are critically inclined, we tend to see the other
fellow's game. Our own personal game is usually exempt from
questioning. How about your terms, Albert?"
"What you say is true enough," Albert had replied, defensively,
"but we cannot get along without terms. We've got to have them.
And it seems to me that we should prefer the terms of science to
the terms of superstition. We've got to be sensible enough not to
question them too far. There's a limit to legitimate questioning. If
everybody began thinking about the problem of knowledge, the
world would stop."
"Would you not like to see it stop?"
"No, why should I?" Albert had asked, with a trace of heat.
"I did not think you would. Motion, motion without result, is
necessary in order to feel futility. We do not think of a stone as
being futile. Neither would we think of and feel an inert world as
futile. You want the world to go on because you like the feeling
of futility?"
"I do not like the feeling," Albert had denied, angrily. "I simply
think that man most often is a futile animal."
Antrum's tone had been obviously satirical: "Albert, of course,
excepted. Albert, having egotistic pleasure in feeling superior to the
poor deluded ones. Albert, the superior futilitarian, pretending to
believe that life, his own included, is futile, without meaning or
aim, but affirming by his every act that his intelligence is the real
thing, that his pleasure is worth living for."
"All right," Albert had said, with quick reversal, his face sud-
denly tensed and pained, his tone of voice bitter, reluctant, resent-
ful. "All right. I give in. I too am an ass. My terms are no more
true than yours. You've reduced us both to the rank of idiots. Hope-
less idiots. What would you have us do, commit suicide?”
Antrum had not answered. He had kept silent for five minutes.
Deliberately he had gazed idiotically at Albert for five minutes. For
this length of time Albert had been able to endure the look. And
then, with a rush of fear and anger, jumping to his feet, he had
violently flung a pillow at Antrum's face and bolted from the room,
headed for a place where he could get straight whiskey.
From a phase of apparent fulfilment, Antrum was now entering
a phase of apparent nonfulfilment. But, emerging from the oppo-
site state, he carried its taste with him some distance into this one,
as one carries the experience of day well into the night. Hence he
did not become aware of the change at once. Not till its stark purity,
more intense and absolute than ever he had known it, indelibly
impressed him, did he become fully aware of it.
Two wishes contested in Nathan as to how he would spend the
summer. One was a wish for a brilliant experience, with sea, place,
swimming, sailing, dancing, motoring, men, women, and conversa-
tion all contributing to a season of gaiety and elegance. This wish
belonged to that part of Antrum which made him a social human
being, one who was strongly drawn towards people and who found
joy and value in their company. The other was a wish for com-
parative solitude, difficult experience, friction, and much work. This
wish arose from the part of Antrum that was Ishmael.
There was a third wish: a force impatient with the opposites of
human experience, an urge to reconcile these opposites and achieve
one inclusive state of being. In this instance, it was a wish that
work and a brilliant life combine and take place more or less at
the same time, in the same general circumstance. Antrum affirmed
this wish as a driving force. He was positive towards the possibility
of its ultimate fulfilment. But he knew that it was not yet able to
achieve itself. And so, it kept in the background, but was active.
The contest was clear-cut between the wish for a brilliant experi-
ence and the wish for comparative solitude and work.
In his New York skyscraper hotel, which Antrum called a mod-
ern monastery, he having one of its stone cells-in the heat of
July he watched himself at different times and more often as the
date for leaving for somewhere approached, be the battle-ground of
this struggle. Detached from it, he understood that it gave rise to
one of the tensions of forces which in sum, co-ordinated, he called
himself. He had a feeling that outward events, obviously, and inner
events, by unseen pressure, would decide the contest in favor of
conditions suitable for work. Antrum aimed to place himself on
the side of the wish which appeared best to his reason.
The wish for a season of gaiety and elegance gathered images
and impressions from his past experience and formed, or tried to
form, the picture of a perfect summer resort. A first-rate modern
hotel whose rooms were well-proportioned, bright, and airy, whose
cuisine was excellent, whose summer occupants were people of
good instincts, good training, good sense, and of general culture-
in brief, truly interesting and delightful people. He wished to expe-
rience the art of human relationships. He desired human adven-
ture. A fine harbor, in the waters of which he could dive and swim.
And he wanted a sail-boat, one of those marvelously graceful things
with racing lines and silk sails. As a boy he had had one which was
then called a knockabout. A tennis court. A dance floor and a good
orchestra. And a sufficient number of charming young women who
were fine dancers.
Antrum smiled ironically at this picture. For, among other things,
he knew that the wish which formed it was an off-shoot of a deeper
wish, of a wish which, together with others of like kind, formed
the interior base of his idealism. This deeper wish was a wish for
the perfect place, the perfect place of dwelling on earth.
Nathan had never seen this perfect place. As with most other
imaginative people, the finest spots in America and in Europe
which he had visited failed to realize his dream. His mind told
him that never on earth would he find it; that if ever he were to
have it, he himself must be able to make and build it. Intuitively
he knew that his heart compelled him to seek over the face of the
earth for a place which doubtless never could be materialized in
physical substance. He sensed that the home his heart desired lay
elsewhere, perhaps far off somewhere upward from the planet
Earth. Yet, knowing this, his wish for the perfect place persistently
crept from its deep lodging, entered into his wanderings, and
reached out before him with the hope that each new place he
went to would be it.
So now, even towards a summer resort, this wish reached out.
It sent sightless projections forward, dim senses of soul-light, and
hovered questioningly over known and imagined coast places and
mountain spots, villages by the sea, towns nestling under brooding
hills or near stark peaks.
Antrum thought: All Nature lower than man is in place. All
Nature, less than man, and other than the animals which man
domesticates, is in place. Eagles have a habitat which suits their
nature and allows their nature to fulfil itself. Sea gulls. Likewise
the sparrows are at home where they dwell. Panthers in the jungle,
and the hordes of tropic beasts. Seals, dolphins, whales, polar bears.
All Nature less than man unites in one the beings of Nature and
their place; so that, Nature, organic part of the great cosmos, and
her beings, are one.
Man alone is dislocated. Lower man dwells in his place with
sullen or indolent acceptance, angry and mean, or happy and sloth-
ful, according to whether the spot is north or south with scant food
hard won or with food in abundance and there for the gathering.
Higher man suffers most. He knows with the conviction of his soul
that he does not belong. The air, the sea, the continents, his own
society, speak his lack of fitness. Each place, and he himself, make
his soul dissatisfied and cause it to hunger for the next. Man is a
goaded orphan. He is a nerve of the cosmos, dislocated, trying to
quiver into place.
Some men try to solve this maladjustment by closing their eyes
in the name of naturalism, or what not, and by trying to stick their
heads in vegetation. Let's be vegetables! Let's be animals! As if
Nature would play make-believe.
Some men invent a mysticism which they hope will bring whole-
ness, and for which they claim a truth and power greater than that
possessed by the kind of mental suggestion which promises to set
and heal a fractured bone. As if God would play make-believe.
Others, perhaps less deluded but more drooping, fashion science
into gospels of defeat and say authoritatively that the final wisdom
is that which enables man to make the best of an irreparably bad
job.
Antrum's wish for the perfect place, and for perfect being, out-
leapt his experience and the ideas of men, and sought fulfilment. The
fact that he was going to change place, that he was going to spend
the summer in some new spot, allowed it to reach out. Pondering
its meaning, with his eyes gazing from a hot body over the roofs
of July New York, with himself knowing that New York, one of
the few livable places on earth, was an unnatural monster, and that
the place he would go to would be a small New York, he shook
his head in ironic comment, with sadness. The wish outleapt his
irony, outleapt his sadness.
A friend who happened to visit him during this period was
shocked and made uneasy by his satire, stimulated by his idealism,
and confused when he tried to reconcile the existence of these two
extremes in the one man. He wanted Antrum to be either out and
out pessimistic, or out and out idealistic. Then he could understand
him. He could, he thought, understand a demon, on the one hand,
and, on the other, an angel. But to his mind the conditions of life
were violated when he saw in the one experience from the one man
two extremes of light shining from the same sight-organs.
The presence of Bruce Rolam in York Harbor, and the fact that
he wished to see him, were the evident considerations which decided
Antrum in favor of this place.
He liked the coast of Maine. Once he had spent a summer in
Tennant's Harbor, south of Rockland, where spruce and pine trees
line the rocky coast and show in solid forms of dark green above
the cold sea water. Where fog came. Where several old seamen
still remained, going fishing or pushing small boats across the har-
bor—a far reach down from the early days when they commanded
three and four mast ships and voyaged all the way from the Bay
of Fundy, called by them the home of fog, to the coast towns of
the southern Atlantic states, and even as far as Africa. The ceme-
tery in Tennant's Harbor is dominated by the graves of sea cap-
tains.
Antrum had once motored through York, and his memory said
it was not a brilliant place. There were several Yorks, he remem-
bered. York Harbor, York Beach, York Village, York Cliffs, and
perhaps another. His friend Bruce, as he later found out, was located
in a spacious house, an inn, on the long grey beach midway between
York Harbor, the fashionable place, and York Beach, the summer
resort.
He had a definite sense that his decision to spend the month of
August in York meant that the wish for a brilliant summer had
lost, and that the wish for difficult experience and work had won.
He knew, however, that this condition was but the temporary out-
come of a temporary victory. From long experience he realized that
motor decisions never settle emotional controversies: though his
body would move in confirmation of one wish's temporary tri-
umph, his psyche was but taking breath to renew the contest of
the same wishes at another time under superficially different
external circumstances.
He was less aware that he was passing from a phase of apparent
fulfilment to a phase of apparent nonfulfilment.
Whenever he entered an experience, this question, implying an
active search, an active scrutiny, an active pondering, preceded the
movements of his body:
“What significance does this experience contain for me? What
meaning can I derive from it?"
Antrum, a human body, was shot from New York. But he, his
slender body showing the strain of heat and work, was fatigued
and somewhat doped by it, and dulled to noise and speed, so that
in his own consciousness he seemed to drift northward. He reached
Portsmouth, N. H., the end of the train trip, in the afternoon; and
there he found his friend Bruce waiting for him. Bruce was of
stocky build, with quick movements, and sunny face. His eyes were
lively and intelligent. His hands were mobile, well shaped, with
sensitive fingers. They did not at once recognize each other. Both
were somewhat changed since they had last seen each other. Nathan
showed the wear and tear of New York, and looked sharper and
older. Bruce showed the wind and sea of Maine, and looked more
jovial and younger. Their mutual hesitation, however, was brief;
and greetings, warm and spontaneous, were hasty because Nathan's
baggage had to be attended to hurriedly else they would miss the
motor coach to York. Nathan, sensitive to first impressions, felt
a happy lifting, quickly followed by a strange weight.
They did not talk much during the motor trip. The coach was
crowded, mostly with women who had come from one or another
of the Yorks to Portsmouth for shopping, and who now were
returning. Nathan registered the human types about him: several
New England spinsters, distinct, quietly superior among the cruder
types. His senses received impressions of the country through which
they were passing, a country of woods and rolling hills, not par-
ticularly Maine, and now and then a house which, if not modern,
was New England.
The coach, speeding east and oceanward, passed through York
Village, a quiet old place, and then through York Harbor, more
summery. As it curved and passed beyond the Harbor to the shore
road, Antrum's heart began to sink. For there was the ocean, cer-
tainly, a glad sight, with its tireless and ever oncoming waves which
broke against occasional rocks and washed the long grey beach.
But here also were camps, clusters of one-room shacks grouped
about a gasoline station and a hot dog and cold drink stand, camps
for auto tourists. Then came a fine open space of fields, woods, and
ocean. And then-a line of ugly squat summer cottages jammed as
close to the road as they could get, as if deliberately set to make
life unlovely and to cramp it to where it could not help but inhale
the fumes of exploded gasoline.
The scene struck Nathan, causing him a twinge of hopeless pain.
Then came a swift rebellion against this avoidable ugliness; a satiric
bitterness; and then a strong thirst for and leap towards an impos-
sible beauty. Bruce sensed Nathan's feelings, and glanced quickly at
him. Doubtless he himself had had the same feeling his first visit
to York.
Antrum told himself that the place was not as ugly as he felt it
to be. But it was at this point that a saying, often forgotten and
often remembered during the course of his life, re-entered his mind
and began to take on new meanings and wider applications: "In
hell we create paradise."
Nathan's eyes swept the entire length of this line of summer cot-
tages, searching for a livable one; and not a single house met his
sight but made him hope that place was not the one. He silently
hoped, against misgivings, that Bruce would not press the button
and stop the coach until they had passed around some curve or
over some hill.
Of a sudden, with one of the impulsive movements characteristic
of him, Bruce touched the button and stopped the coach. They got
off before a house which Nathan had not seen because it lay back
from the road. It was a large white house, with a porch around,
and quite different from the cottages they had passed. Antrum's first
impression was that it rested on a slight rise of ground with self-
respect, common sense, and a sort of ample dignity. The green of
Nature surrounded it, a well-kept lawn and flower garden. And
behind it could be seen a fringe of woods. His spirit took breath
and thankfulness.
Heavy with bags they moved up the board-walk and were soon
received by The Shawl, to Antrum, as the time went on, a centre
of life and of interest.
One of the sons of the house, Charles, met them. On entering the
door, he was greeted by Mrs. Shawl, a fine looking woman with a
crown of silvery hair. She had read and liked one of his books, he
knew. And now he felt her welcome to him personally.
Once in his room, with Bruce helping him make a hasty settle-
ment, the first question he asked was:
"Who is here of interest?" His tone of voice conveyed that he
felt the adventure of being in a new house.
Bruce looked undecided, as he often did when asked a question.
Then, after a slight pause, with characteristic directness and rapidity
he answered: "They come and go. But there is Miss Oliver, Mrs.
Shawl's assistant. And you'll find Mrs. Shawl interesting to talk
with."
The matter was not pursued further because Bruce then sug-
gested that they go for a plunge in the ocean. He asked Nathan if
he had brought a suit. He himself went in each day around four
o'clock. They would have tea in Nathan's room after they came out.
Antrum tipped his head to one side, doubt in his eyes. For he
knew that the sun was slanting far down a grey day and that the
waters along the Maine coast, even in August, were cold. He had
just come from the heat of New York. The trip had been hot and
tiring. He wanted to be in condition to start writing the next morn-
ing. But, in a mild way, it was a game proposition. His body began
anticipating the cold shock. A positive response arose. With zest he
said yes.
The water was cold. Bruce sported in it like a young male dol-
phin. As one seasoned to it, he laughed at Nathan's shouts when
the cold struck him where it was most cold. Antrum plunged under
a high wave and began stretching himself in one of the strokes, a
crawl, he had learned as a youth, at which time he was an expert
swimmer. Now, he was decidedly off-form. But for a short while
he enjoyed the water. Soon, however, he felt himself contracting and
about to shiver; so he went out, hurriedly, telling Bruce that he
would wait for him on the beach.
Nathan wished there was whiskey. After tea, Bruce went to his
room to write letters, and Antrum, wondering who of interest he
was going to meet, took from his bags and arranged about the
room the necessary articles of use. His nerves still tingled with the
shock of the cold water. In New York, he had wished he could get
cold. Now, in York, he wished he could get hot. He was still
uncomfortably contracted. But even so, he was much energized;
and therefore glad that he had gone in. He had a happy sense that
his vacation was well started.
It was not long before Bruce entered saying it was almost
time for dinner. So, dressed informally for the evening, they went
down to the main floor. There, in the hallway, at her desk, was
Miss Oliver. She gaily arose when she saw them coming. Bruce
introduced Nathan to her. A bit of pleasantry was exchanged, and
then the two men entered the room where, off to himself, Bruce
had his meals.
Antrum recognized that his perceptions of Miss Oliver had been
perceptions of her character. Save that her bearing was upright and
striking, he had no clear picture of her appearance. But he had a
definite impression that she was a young woman of considerable
ability, and something of a law unto herself. She was, perhaps, of
an active type which makes social contacts with ease, but finds it
difficult to be inwardly intimate. She had quality, and was, obvi-
ously, in the class of superior human beings. Interested in her, when
the opportunity offered he asked Bruce about her and thus added
to the impressions which his mind worked over.
The room they dined in connected with the family dining-room
but was separated by a hall from the main guest room. Bruce had
wished this room for his own, and Mrs. Shawl had given it to him
so that he would be spared the necessity of mingling and talking
with people when he was not in the mood for it. From this circum-
stance, and from other happenings in the course of the next few
days, Antrum soon formed the opinion that Mrs. Shawl not only
had a real liking and appreciation of literature but that she valued
its creators. He wanted to know more about her; and gradually he
became interested in the Shawl family.
The room itself, like all the rooms in the house, had a high ceil-
ing and gave a sense of space. In one corner was an open hearth.
Two windows opened on different sides of the porch; one, a large
plate glass, before which their table, set for two, was placed.
Through it the ocean could be seen. Behind Nathan's chair, on a
small table, there was a row of books, one by Bruce, and most of
them by modern authors.
As Bruce had written in his letters, the food was excellent, of
first-rate quality and very well prepared. Unlike the many flat taste-
less concoctions of old meat and canned vegetables thrown together
and eaten merely because they fill, this meal was a blend of vital
articles which made one glad to eat. Nathan learned that the cook,
supervised by Mrs. Shawl, was a Philippino. And so was their
waiter, a rapidly moving, quiet, gentle young fellow who smiled
often and seemed to find humor in his service.
During the dinner the two men talked more or less at random
of New York, literature, happenings in the literary world, personali-
ties, and of their own recent and near future works. And while
the conversation went on, they were really moving closer to each
other, feeling for, touching and finding the inner base of their
friendship. This movement of talk and contact continued, deepening.
Among other things, Nathan mentioned that he had written
ahead reserving a room at a hotel in York Beach, and that he
would like to go up there the next day, look around, and confirm
his reservation. To this Bruce agreed, but restated his wish that
Nathan remain at The Shawl as his guest for a few more days.
Nathan said that he would be glad to. He explained, however, that
he wanted to get settled as soon as possible; and then went on to
tell why he preferred having room and meals separate, as he would
have them in the hotel selected at York Beach where no meals were
served.
There was for him, he said, a temptation to over-eat while at the
seashore if much good food were regularly placed before him, and
if, for some reason or other, he found it difficult to work. He might
find it difficult to work at first because the sea air for the first week
had a tendency to let him down. It braced and energized his body,
but tended to 'wet' his psyche and loosen its tension far below the
degree necessary for productive work. In such a state, it was very
easy to over-eat and rapidly grow heavier. The more you ate, the
less you could do. The less you could do, the more you ate. Until,
finally, you just sat around, tugged and strained to no effect, over-
fed, but with nothing on your mind save impatience to eat the next
meal. Such a thing had once happened to him-a period of sluggish
torture. He did not wish to repeat the experience.
It was decided that they would pay a visit to York Beach, which
Bruce said was lively and with its share of "natural selection" going
on, some time during the afternoon of the following day.
In his bed that night, Antrum asked himself how he was going
to like York. The Shawl, yes. But a picture of the line of ugly sum-
mer cottages flashed on his mind, and he had to remind himself
that he had come to York, not for a brilliant life, but for work and
because he wanted to be with Bruce. When this point was estab-
lished for the time being, he turned his mind to recalling and
pondering the events of the day.
First of all, he saw himself, in the period of a day, removed from
New York and its conditions to York Beach. Last night, he had
slept in a bed in a room high up in a New York hotel. He had gone
to bed late, his mind actively thinking. Sounds of infrequent trucl.s
and motor-cars far down on the street had come up to him. A lone
horse clip-clopping. A clock striking three, sending its tones over a
small space of nocturnal New York. A man and woman in a street
brawl, like cats, their raucous high-pitched voices carrying upwards
as through a silent corridor. Someone in a room, how far off or
where he could not tell, screaming intermittently because of physical
pain: perhaps a woman in child-birth, perhaps someone who would
be taken the next day to a hospital for an operation. The whistle
of a boat on the Hudson River, a sound throaty and deep which
made Nathan think it must be an ocean liner, though it was an odd
hour for a steamer to be either leaving or entering port. Antrum's
mind had crossed the Atlantic and thought of a friend in London,
of life in Paris, of southern France. Well, he was going to York. He
had felt the contest of his wishes start up. He had placed his mind
on the outline of his next book, and had tried to judge the fitness
of the place given its various parts. His mind had swung off and
begun working too feverishly on the matter of culture in America.
He had gone to sleep with his question:
"What is waiting for me in York? What meaning?"
And the answer: "Doubtless I shall know a month or a year after
it has happened to me."
Now, after a series of events, a train trip, a motor ride, few of
them outstanding, but not one which he could have foreseen even
in routine existence he could not see, not actually see the step ahead
of him: all events, great and small, were unknown; and therefore,
the intelligent man had to develop towards life an experimental atti-
tude-he listened with amazement to people telling calmly and with
certainty what they were going to do next week, next month, next
year . . . now, he lay on a bed in a room on the coast of Maine.
The room was in a house. Other people. . People, in a profound
sense, strangers. Fellow visitors on the planet Earth. They too, for
a short while, saw the stars and ocean. They too for a short while
took food, worked, loved, and reproduced their kind. The house
was on earth. The earth was in the universe. Soon he would die.
An end to the modes of perception called Nathan Antrum. He
could hear the sounds of waves breaking on the beach. The air he
breathed was moist and salty. It was early, not more than eleven
o'clock. His mind wanted to sleep. Yes, perhaps the train trip and
the plunge in the ocean had started a physical cycle. His body felt
strong. His mind was drowsy. But he held it for a short while on
Bruce.
He re-affirmed his conviction that few men in America contained
the varied vivid materials of culture as Bruce did. Bruce's senses
were alive to the sensuous world. He was intuitive, often penetrating
and accurate. He felt life, its comedy and pathos, its joy and tragedy.
He made perceptions which he thought about. Bruce used his mind.
He was trying to build sincere and solid human structures. His
quick intelligence was familiar with many of the best products of
western civilization. Bruce was a living being, and a clean man.
His temperament was vital, impulsive, sunny, generous. He was
jolly, a person to have a good time with. He had strange fears,
doubts, confusions, odd reservations and unwillingnesses. But he
was a man of the present and of the future, one of the builders of
America. Antrum felt a renewed appreciation of and affection for
him. "Yes, Bruce!" he said. And then he told himself that though
he had seen many of his manifestations, Bruce's basic motives, his
essential pattern, his dominant problems, faiths and doubts, were
things unknown to him. Sleep stole over his greater interest in, his
increased wish to understand his friend Bruce.
CHAPTER II
NEXT morning after breakfast he sat on the porch with Bruce for
a short while, and then they both retired to their rooms to work.
Antrum had purposely begun a short essay before leaving New
York, his idea being that with a small form already under way,
the disturbance caused by a change of place would not be so great
but what he could enter this form immediately on arriving at York,
carry it through, and, in the process of doing so, prepare and condi-
tion himself for undertaking a more difficult work.
His idea, he granted, had been good. But now as he leaned back
in his chair, re-read the pages he had written, and tried to establish
a vital contact with the article, he felt alien to and removed from
its contents, unable to make its form move. With much effort he
managed to write several paragraphs which were, he knew, fair in
themselves, but which had no relation to the form of the essay. So,
growing skeptical of his present state, wondering what the change
to Maine was really going to do to him, recognizing that his over-
concern was symptomatic of a fatigued condition, but determined
to push through and on despite resistance, he put pen and paper
aside, lit a cigarette, and composed himself to the task of thinking
anew into the material which, in New York, had appeared quite
clear and vivid to his mind.
He found that his thoughts refused to move. The more he tried
to force his mind the duller it became. The duller his mind became,
the sharper grew the lines of his face. His chest tended to curve in.
Still, he held at it. Had someone looked in the door, he would have
thought that Antrum was in very intense concentration. He himself
looked in the door at Antrum sitting there, and gave a laugh at the
lie of his posture. He was indeed, posturing, not functioning.
Thinkers and writers and artists were strange creatures behind
closed doors. It was well that naïve eyes never had a chance to peep
through key-holes at the world's great ones. After another lengthy
trial and failure, he resigned himself to the comparatively honest
occupation of reading a book till lunch time.
When he met Bruce, he was cool and pleasant outside, showing
no trace of his morning's struggle. Inside, he was impatient to get
settled in the hotel at York Beach.
He looked at Bruce as they had lunch and wondered what diffi-
culties with ideas and words he had had that morning.
Later, they started for York Beach, a walk of about two miles.
The tide was out. Bruce led the way along the long grey beach.
Bruce was free to respond to the ocean, to the sky and clouds, the
various hues on the water, and to the joy of moving his body
through an off-sea wind and over the smooth hard-packed wet
sand.
The mingled odors of beached seaweed and of drift wood, odors
which had come to his senses during a glorious period of Antrum's
boyhood, became taste in his mouth and started a joyous voice of
long ago. In his heart an image moved, the picture of a slender
lovely girl-child who had shown surprising trust and courage
through a gale, in an open boat, with sails straining and boom
jibbing, he the youthful skipper at the tiller. To some place in life,
his lips opened to an instant feeling and formed the word and sent
it winging: "Beautiful." And in tenderness he added, “my dear."
But his eyes were searching to find where among this line of ugly
summer cottages was his hotel.
At one place, in order to avoid a stream of water which came
from the land, they found it necessary to gain the shore road and
walk along it for a bit. Antrum came face to face with these summer
shacks and their inhabitants.
Weather-beaten greys and yellows, the cottages, a long unbroken
line of them, were on him once he touched the road. He looked
people on the porches in the face. Almost in one step he could have
passed from the oily road onto their front porches. There were so
many cars speeding up and down that it was impossible to walk
along the road. And so close were the cottages to the road that the
foot-path in front of them was not more than a yard wide. If he
stepped from the path to the right, he was on the road. If to the
left he would have been in someone's house.
In this manner people from the cities spent their vacations, he
reflected. In the cities they were jammed, and their habits forbade
them to use the country. With the ocean before them, and the entire
state of Maine behind them, with open fields and woods extending
for miles all around, they crouched, elbowed, and pinched life one
yard removed from the motor-road. They were like a line of cars in
the subway. They dominated the scene, threw a pall of dreary vul-
garity over the country-side, and, by their assertiveness, compelled
one to forget the presence of the ocean and of the high arching sky.
Antrum felt like knocking them back with one liberating gesture.
As he walked past cottage after cottage he observed the people
sitting on the porches or passing in bathing suits of loud colors from
them to the beach. They were, evidently, a low type of city folk.
The younger people had a certain bloom of flesh. Their skins were
smooth and tan because of the winds and sun. The older ones were
thick-boned, heavy of body, with strange hard eyes set in dull blood-
less faces. The young folks were waiting to live. The old folks were
waiting to die. Here was a segment of the great lower middle class,
the rock-bottom of America.
They ate, they loafed, they talked a little, they slept, they woke
up and got up, they went in bathing, they jumped in and out of
motor-cars. They indulged, as Bruce would say, in natural selection,
procreating new organism for Nature and new citizens for the
world's greatest commonwealth. Now and again one of them would
pay five dollars to be taken for a fifteen minute ride in an airplane
whose station, for the summer, was on the beach. And then, their
summer vacation over, they would return to the industrial and
commercial cities of New England, cities which knew all about
the presidential candidates, but did not know that Emerson and
Thoreau had ever lived.
Antrum told himself that a different toss of the dice might have
made him one of them. He began pondering what difference in
meaning there was between himself and these shore-dwellers.
They were approaching an arm of land which curved out into
the ocean. Antrum noticed that the houses on it looked more liv-
able, and hoped that his hotel was near the point.
And then he realized that the place was gradually depressing
him. But why? he asked. Why was he identifying with these people
and their houses? What made him accept it as a settled fact that
he was going to spend a month in York? Theoretically, he was free
to turn about at once and leave it. He had not pledged himself to
remain. Bruce would understand. The motor coaches and railroads
were still running. There were hundreds of towns farther up the
coast, if he wished to be in Maine. There were places in New
Hampshire and Vermont. There were sailings each week to Europe.
Why York? Of all places, why York?
Bruce was leading the way along a road which cut across the
arm of land. They ascended a rise of ground, and, after following
several turnings, there, on the other side, was the village of York
Beach.
The first building seen was a large yellow-brown affair, like a
huge packing box, which Antrum took to be a hotel. Its back was
towards him. To either side he could see patches of the ocean. It
must be called, he thought, "Ocean View." Bruce mentioned, with
a grimace, that it was typical of the large cheaper hotels at Maine
summer resorts. To Antrum it appeared as a number of the shore
cottages bunched into one. It gave him a similar feeling of distaste.
But, on entering the village itself, a different scene presented
itself. Along the streets the buildings were newer, and a sufficient
number of them were fresh painted white, so that, in the brilliant
afternoon sunlight, it had a clean if cheap liveliness which made it
in all ways preferable to the line of shacks they had passed. Cars
ranging from Fords and Chevrolets to Packards and Cadillacs were
parked along the curbs and passing back and forth. And people,
some of them in colorful summer attire, were moving with the
animation of visitors and of summer business in a small sea-side
town.
Lines of electric bulbs were swung across the streets. Antrum
guessed that at night their lights would make York Beach bright,
and, in a manner, festive.
It was, evidently, of the summer resort type which tries in a lim-
ited way to provide the sort of things popular in Coney Island and
Atlantic City. There was a casino; a carousel; a movie; a store with
large plate glass windows through which one could see a machine
pulling chewing candy, kisses; several stands for hot dogs; one or
two novelty shops; restaurants which advertised shore dinners; and
a Great White Way. The season was at its height.
As they walked through its streets and Antrum compared the
liveliness of the town with the dullness of the summer cottages
lined along the shore road, the idea again came to him that Ameri-
cans are animate only when they are making or spending money.
This place, like all the towns and cities of America which show
evident signs of life, was not a summer resort, much less was it a
place of living; it was, like Coney Island, Atlantic City, Palm Beach,
New York and Chicago, a money-resort. The life of the people con-
sisted in exchanging money. Let the exchange stop, and they would
stop living.
He had a sharp sense of how York Beach would appear when
the season ended.
Antrum saw himself spending the summer in this place; and he
turned to Bruce. "You were right," he said. “No better place for
work."
Bruce nodded quickly and smiled. “Nothing else to do,” he con-
firmed. "Work, and bathing, sleep, and good food-unless you like
ice-cream sodas and the movies." There was a playful question in
his tone of voice. But his body, spurred by feelings of how alien he
was in York Beach, moved faster through its streets.
A sign showed them the direction of Antrum's hotel; and before
long they found themselves looking at two grey painted wood-build-
ings which bore the name:The Halsey. To one side of The Halsey,
between it and the house next door, a path led towards the ocean.
Antrum suggested that before going in the hotel office they walk
and see what kind of location the hotel had.
Emerging from the path they were greeted by a view which made
them realize that they were indeed on the coast of Maine. The vil-
lage of York Beach receded and was forgotten.
They were on a promontory. At their feet were the marvelous
rock formations of the coast. The ocean, deep blue and glittering,
spread out before them. And over the way, the projecting arm of
land which they had crossed, formed a sort of cape, a horse-shoe
shaped coast line, the harbor about which the houses of York Beach
clustered. At a fair remove, people were in bathing. The joyous
sounds of their voices as they sported in waves, laughs, playful
screams, the kinds of sound which the surf invariably evokes, came
to them. The front rooms of the hotel, and its two porches, one at
the first and one at the second story, looked full on this scene.
Antrum saw at a glance that The Halsey had the best location in
York Beach.
After sunning on the rocks a while, they went to the office, and
there Antrum met the proprietor, who he immediately liked. The
owner was a middle-aged man, rather slow in speech and move-
ments, and with a kindly, open, smiling face. He took Antrum
to show him the room which had been reserved for him, telling
on the way, that it faced the ocean.
On the second floor front his key unlocked a door, and Antrum
entered a room which tried to reject him. His heart sank. It was,
true enough, a front room. And it was a clean room. But, in the
first place, its three windows, instead of overlooking the water,
opened straight out on the second story porch. Not only could he
overhear, but he could not escape hearing the conversation of the
women who occupied the rocking chairs. They were right on him.
The room itself, for Antrum, a tall man, was small and cramped;
and, for a third unwanted feature, the door between this room and
the next was so thin that he could distinctly hear the movements
of the next room's occupants. He sensed in a flash that he would
not have even moderate privacy, much less true quiet and solitude.
In effect, the room was much like a small stuffy interior cabin on
an out of date ocean liner.
His question to the proprietor brought the reply that there was
not another vacant room in the house. And then a strange thing
happened.
A compelling force which urged him to take it. He had a sharp
sense, and a weighty feeling. that the line of his fate was leading,
had led him, straight into this room. This slight incident, a matter
of a room, served to give him an unusually vivid experience of
fatality. He felt and knew that he could not escape his pattern.
Though he resisted, he knew without doubt that the room was his.
Being told, as a selling point, that a lady minister had previously
occupied it, made him smile. But he responded to the information
that there was a large corner room on the third floor which would
be vacated within a week, at which time, if he wished, he could
move into it. He followed his prospective landlord to this upper
room.
It was what Antrum wished. A corner room, large, airy, sunny,
with open hearth, it had two front windows which looked, not
upon a porch, but on the ocean and the cape-a really wonderful
view; and a side window through which, in the distance, he could
see small figures in the surf and sunning on the beach. Had it been
empty, he would have moved into it at once. The prospect of it
being soon vacated weighed in favor of his temporarily taking the
room below. This was, he knew, the busy season. The chances were
that he would not be able to find in any of the other hotels a better
place. Besides, The Halsey had just the right location. And so,
determined to make the best of the room downstairs, he took it
with the understanding that he would have the upper room within
a week. Then he rejoined Bruce, put on a good face about his new
quarters, and together they left York Beach and returned to The
Shawl. He was not to occupy his new place until the following
afternoon.
That evening after dinner Miss Oliver, gay and lovely in a soft
summer dress, entered their room and remained to chat with the
two men for a short while. Antrum had opportunity to take addi-
tional impressions of her. Words passed easily between the three of
them: opinions and feelings of past and present experiences with
summer places, swimming, and, of special interest to Antrum, opin-
ions given by Miss Oliver as to the difficulties and amusements of
running a summer inn. Before long, however, saying with a smile
that she hoped she had not delayed a serious literary conversation,
she arose and went to finish her duties for that day.
"An exceedingly well set up young woman," Antrum commented.
Bruce nodded agreement, and added: "She walks as though she
has a good sense of herself."
"Quite so," said Nathan. "When she enters or leaves a room, when
she is present, you know you are dealing with a real person. I
wonder how old she is?"
"In her early twenties," Bruce answered, noting Nathan's grow-
ing interest, and smiling inwardly as he saw the two of them poten-
tial rivals. “An interesting personality,” he continued impersonally.
"In some ways she is very young, a young girl, a child, naïve, quite
innocent, though she likes to play sophisticated. And then again,
she is mature. She is more mature than most of the men she will
meet. As so often happens with women like her, she'll probably
marry an inferior man, and dissipate herself ruling and mothering
him."
Nathan gave a grunt. They lapsed into silence, each concerned
with his own unexpressed thoughts. They lit cigarettes, and,
from time to time, glanced out the door of their room to see who
was passing through the hall. The evening had grown chilly. A
woman whom Nathan saw dressed in a fur lined white coat, was, he
learned from Bruce, from Chicago. Nathan was interested in people
from Chicago. With her children and a maid she was occupying a
cottage which belonged to the inn. This was her second summer at
Long Beach.
Impulsively, Bruce began discussion of a subject he had been
thinking into. Going directly to the point, he said:
"I'd like your ideas, Nathan, on what an individual is. I'm
working at something which will have to show the difference be-
tween the herd and an individual, and I'm not sure that I know
what either of them is."
Before Nathan tried to formulate his ideas, he made the percep-
tion, with a feeling of comradeship, that he and Bruce, different in
their approaches to the world though they were, Bruce being located
mostly in his feelings and senses and primarily meeting life with
his emotional intelligence, he being located for the most part in
his mind and primarily meeting life with his mental intelligence,
not only had intuitions of life in common, a fact he had noted
before, but that they both, at this point of their careers, recognized
the problem of the individual and saw the necessity of trying to
clarify their understanding of it.
"As a general definition, I might say that an individual is one
who, centred in himself, located in his own centre of gravity, is
more or less able to control his own functions. In contrast to a col-
lective person whose centre of gravity is outside himself, located
in the mass, and whose functions are controlled or manipulated by
suggestion, by mass suggestion."
Bruce did not like the idea of control, that an individual con-
trolled himself. To him, it had undesirable "mental control" con-
notations. It meant that the person who exercised it was trying, in
effect, to deny his emotions and cut himself off from life. He told
Nathan this, and expressed his view that the individual, while re-
maining himself, must at the same time enter in and be part of the
great stream of things. Nathan answered that he thought an
individual must in truth be in and part of life. But the question was:
part of what life? There were all kinds of life. Stupid life, diseased
life, insane life, intelligent life, and so on. Selection, therefore, was
necessary. And it was precisely this ability to make intelligent
selections, which, among other things, characterized an individual.
To which Bruce agreed.
As for control, Nathan explained that he meant not mental con-
trol, not cutting off, but the control of an intelligent will resulting
in perfected functioning. A control of one's organism similar to
that exercised by a skilled mechanic over his machine.
"It seems to me," Nathan concluded, "that not only the individ-
ual but society in general should aim to attain and establish such
control. Otherwise. . . . Well, look at us. Individuals, that is, this
person, that person, tearing themselves and being torn to pieces.
They misuse themselves and are misused. Likewise, nations, and
civilizations. In so far as it is a matter of working properly, machines
are superior to human beings. Perhaps this is one reason why ma-
chines are, as it were, dominating us. We apply to machines what
we do not apply to ourselves."
They were thoughtfully silent for a while, and then Bruce asked:
"Do you think an individual is independent of the herd?"
"No, I do not, not entirely. Doubtless no person escapes, or can
completely transcend being the mechanical, organic and psychologi-
cal, product of his parents, of his local environment, of his age in
general with its dominant forms and forces. We probably exist
within mankind as a cell exists within our bodies. What affects a
skin cell is likely to affect a brain cell. Each part acts in all acts
of the whole. But at the same time I think there are human beings
who exist in a state of comparative independence. I am certain
that there are men who, in comparison with the mass of men, can
be said to think for themselves, feel for themselves, and act for them-
selves. They have more or less individualizd the materials of their
experience: they have digested, assimilated, and crystallized them,
and are able to give them forth, plus some unique contribution from
themselves, to their world-era. They are able to create forms. They
tend to move by inner initiative. They are active agents rather than
passive particles. Individuals are force-"
"Yes," said Bruce, "individuals are force, in contast to the inertia
of the mass. I have thought of the herd in terms of inertia. It seems
to me that it is inertia. But I sometimes doubt I wonder if there
is such a thing as the herd. Some people, you know, say there is
not. And after all, life is divided by our minds. I mean, it is our
mind, human minds, which divide life. Life is one great something,
and all living creatures are integral parts of it. How do we know
we are not falsifying reality when we allow mental categories to
split it up?"
"Doubtless we are" said Nathan "But now, you are questioning
man's mode of perception, mode of thought, and asking how we
know anything." He shrugged his shoulders, but was seriously con-
cerned. "I have a notion that, fundamentally, that is, in terms of
objective reality, we, men, are consistently wrong. Our arts, religions,
sciences, and philosophies are probably no more than records of
how the world appears to some men. Personally, I have no means
of knowing truth from fiction—that is, fundamentally. I have no
means of proof one way or the other. Not one of us has a proof
of proof. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as personal knowledge.
And too, such as they are, our senses, feelings, and intellect are, we
may assume, we have to assume, instruments of knowledge. My own
tell me that there is such a thing as collective man, and that there
is such a thing as an individual. And I think I can make workable
distinctions between the two. What more, I do not know. Yes, I
can, perhaps, present these distinctions in a way so that whoever
has already somewhat experienced them, will more or less under-
stand what I mean. I assume that men have certain fundamental
experiences and understandings in common. I assume that men
can and do communicate with each other. I take this assumed fact
to be a fact in truth, and I see this fact as one of the few real bases
of real hope. It means that there is such a thing as objectivity. It
may mean that this objectivity is intelligible to man."
"Yes," Bruce nodded, "I suppose so. But what-"
"If, for instance," Nathan continued, "you and I view the
psychology of the coming presidential election, I think we will agree
that it is a collective psychology. Without reflection, without in-
dividual thinking, people all over the country are now divided into
two opposing camps. Some are for candidate A and against candi-
date B. Some are for candidate B and against candidate A. The ones
who are for A, respond to an image, a symbol, which, in general
outline, is identical for all of them. They respond mechanically. The
same holds true of those who are for B. People in favor of A, irre-
spective of the class to which they belong, irrespective of the section
of the country they inhabit, have the same 'reasons' for supporting
him; they hold in common identical opinions for opposing B. Listen
to people talk for A and against B, and you will hear them voice the
same opinions, the same likes and dislikes, the same preferences
and prejudices, whether they live in Maine, in Boston, New York,
Chicago, or San Francisco. I have done so, and it is my testimony
that in the majority of people I have observed no sign of individual
thought. Therefore I take the phenomenon to be an instance of
mass psychology. The phenomenon exists. What descriptive term
we use for it is comparatively unimportant. Yes?”
"I suppose so," said Bruce. And then he asked: "And how did
you define an individual?"
"One who can fulfil Leonardo da Vinci's precept: 'Let thine every
work be a new phenomenon in Nature.' One who can contribute
to his environment, not merely mirror it. Or, to put it in terms I
use quite often, one who is, not conformative, but formative."
"What is it, what is the source from which an individual contrib-
utes something new to this environment? Where does this new
thing come from?" asked Bruce.
"From the essence of that person."
"Have all people this essence, or only some?"
"All people, or, most people, I think," Nathan answered.
"Then why-" Bruce began.
"Because of difference in strength, difference in availability, dif-
ference in development, difference in the circumstances encoun-
tered-"
Bruce asked: "Do you think the time will come when all people
will be individualized?"
"I don't know, Bruce. I have two sets of opinions on that ques-
tion; and I have no means of ascertaining which of them is nearer
true. One set says, yes, in time, all men will recognize the need,
and will become individuals. The other set says that this is not
necessary, but that, on the contrary, there will always be the two
kinds of men. Perhaps one of the main tensions in mankind is
created by just this opposition, not conflict, between individuals and
the mass. The mass realizes itself, that is, is able to fulfill its func-
tion, because, among other things, there are individuals. Individ-
uals realize themselves, are able to fulfil their functions, because,
among other things, there is the mass. Perhaps this is so, and must
be so always."
"Do you think that those who are potential individuals must be-
come realized individuals, that is, that unless they do develop them-
selves, they will fail in life? They will fail, fail inwardly, no matter
what their apparent success?"
"Decidedly," said Nathan. “And as I think you know, it is one
of my aims, one of my main aims, to understand how this necessary
making of an individual is accomplished."
"Who would you give as instances, who do you think have
achieved individuality?”
"Leonardo da Vinci."
"Goethe is the one I think of," said Bruce. "But have you never
found that in talking with people they criticize you for referring
to what they call stock examples?”
"And thereby disclose the fact that they are not really interested,"
said Nathan. "Any example is fresh provided you give it real
content."
During the long and pensive silence that followed, the woman
from Chicago, Mrs. Galt, came quietly to the door, looked in,
and, after deciding that she was not interrupting a discussion, asked
Bruce, Mr. Rolam, as she called him, if he and his friend would
not like to join herself and two others in the room across the hall.
She said that she and they had been trying to amuse themselves with
three-hand bridge, and had had poor results. She also remarked
that she asked them, Bruce and Nathan, despite the fact that she
felt they would not find the company interesting.
Bruce introduced Nathan to Mrs. Galt, a stocky but well shaped
woman whose hair was just turning. Her cheeks had a natural
out-door flush. She could talk continuously, somewhat to Bruce's
irritation. He was not over-willing to join her party. However, he
questioned Nathan's eyes. Antrum said yes; and so, the three of
them moved towards the other room.
There the two men saw a young married couple seated before a
card table. They were people of fair middle class birth and training,
soft spoken, conventional, unimaginative. They tried to be pleasant.
She was; he wasn't. Introductions were passed around, and then
Mrs. Galt informed the couple that though Mr. Rolam, a famous
American literary figure, was in "retreat" at Long Beach and did
not like to be disturbed, he had gallantly consented to be with
them this evening. Antrum could see that Mrs. Galt's respect for
Bruce was not unmingled with a wish to tease him. He could
also see that Bruce, inwardly, was not pleased with the situation.
In truth, Mrs. Galt got under his skin.
A rather lively repartee started, Bruce against Mrs. Galt, and
had the effect of rousing everyone. When this subsided, as it did
when Bruce withdrew his sharp remarks, polite conversation began.
It was dominated by Mrs. Galt who always managed to lead it from
impersonal subjects such as politics-the young man
was for candidate B, in the most approved manner-back to the personal
subject of herself. She talked much about herself, about her chil-
dren, her babies, domestic problems, and personal difficulties.
Just as she was beginning to tell of an unfortunate friend of hers,
an acquaintance who, without thought or consideration, had placed
her troubles on her, Mrs. Galt's, shoulders, Miss Oliver, just re-
turned from a walk on the beach, came in and joined them.
She also wore a white coat with fur collar, and looked quite
stunning. It was open now and showed a silk dress of smart de-
sign which neatly fitted the forms of her body. Her eyes sparkled.
Her cheeks were flushed. Her voice rang cheerily.
"Don't let me interrupt," she said.
Antrum was about to tell her that charm could never interrupt,
that it was the nature of charm to add delight to all experience.
Her presence placed him in a mood not only to appreciate quality,
but to flirt a bit. But he hesitated, and heard someone else assure
Miss Oliver that with her present the party was complete.
And then Mrs. Galt continued and finished telling about her
pathological friend. Bruce grimaced. On a certain point, namely,
on the question of what to do with and for people who were in bad
states and who were seemingly unable to do more than hang on
the necks of their friends, she desired advice and turned to Bruce
for it. Perhaps for advice, perhaps for sympathy or for appreciation
of the way in which she had handled a difficult case. Bruce, wishing
to see how Nathan would handle the present difficult case, referred
her to him. "Ask Mr. Antrum," Bruce told Mrs. Galt. His eyes
twinkled mischievously. "Ask Mr. Antrum. He is a psychologist.'
"Are you?" Mrs. Galt pounced on Nathan. "Are you? A psycho-
analyst?"
Several pairs of eyes looked to ask Antrum if in truth he were.
And then, without giving him time to say yes or no, Mrs. Galt pur-
sued him: "I wish you'd tell me something about myself."
Bruce giggled.
"Are you a psychologist, Mr. Antrum?" asked Miss Oliver, seri-
ously interested, pressing her question deeper than Mrs. Galt's.
"Perhaps, of a kind," he answered her.
"I wish you would tell me about myself," said Miss Oliver.
"I wish he would tell us about all ourselves," said the young
married woman, as a matter which the conventions demanded she
enter. Bruce laughed. Chuckled.
"Sure," he urged, “a round table, with Mr. Antrum as Socrates,
or, if you prefer, as Freud, or Jung, or Adler."
Antrum was looking with a level gaze at Miss Oliver. He did not
reply to her, however. And she could not tell whether his look
meant that he did not want to, or did not think she was seriously
interested, or was weighing the matter, or what.
Antrum's silence caused the subject to be dropped. Mrs. Galt,
far from frustrated volubly led the talk into other channels.
Bruce had had his laugh, and was in good spirits for the rest of
the time.
Then, growing sleepy, they said goodnight.
Once again in darkness, lying on a soft mattress, aware of the
moist sea air he breathed, Antrum thought of Miss Oliver, Alma
Oliver. He knew that she was beginning to call forth something
from him, and wondered what would be its nature. Her question,
risking cancelation in an atmosphere of chatter, had carried to him
its note of sincere interest. Yes, he would answer her. He wondered
how much and what she wanted to know. How much she could
bear. Knowing that most people's wishes for understanding, and
capacity to bear it, were limited, he questioned what were her limits.
Some people, even intelligent people, he knew, measured their in-
formation according to what they considered they could afford to
know. Many people were quite aware, or believed they were, that,
given their position in society, if they wished to keep it comfort-
ably, there was only so much and no more they could afford to
understand. Some others, not sensing the risks of knowledge, de-
luded themselves with the belief that they wished to know every-
thing. Then there were others who sincerely wished to understand,
but were limited in capacity. And still others, a few, who had ex-
perienced the limits of how much they dared and could bear to
know.
There was no doubt that Alma was drawing something from
him.
Then his mind began running over the discussion he had had
with Bruce on the subject of individuality. In time, an idea took
form in words.
"The only man who can leave the earth to other men is he who
has won it for himself."
For some while longer he pondered the meaning of this formula-
tion.
CHAPTER III
THE following morning Antrum had a repetition of difficulty
with work. His general state was similar to that of the day before.
He felt in excellent shape, physically and psychologically, but
things refused to move. He felt an increased contact with this new
world at York; a decreased contact with his own individual world.
People and events in York, York impressions, York rhythms, had
entered and were active in him; he himself was comparatively in-
active. He felt himself losing his customary sense of self. Nathan
Antrum was incorporating a new form, and therefore, for the time
being, giving way to it. And though, since he did not wish it so,
he thrust it from consciousness, he had a definite sense that the days
ahead were going to intensify this condition.
True, he managed to write one page which belonged to the form
of his article; but, when judged by the way he wrote when really
functioning, this was nothing; and the very manner in which it
came out let him know that it was a forced product. The energy
consumed in writing it was sufficient for ten pages. He knew he
would not continue working, trying to work, on the basis of such
wasteful practice. He felt half inclined to believe that after all per-
haps he needed a few days of comparative loafing. Nevertheless,
since he was reluctant to give up an undertaking once his jaws were
closed on it, he spent the morning appearing adequate but inwardly
struggling with himself and carrying on a losing fight. He told
himself that the fact that he was going to move to a new place
in the afternoon doubtless had something to do with his condition.
Once settled in his new place, things would go better.
Later on when the two men were together, it was arranged that
Nathan each evening would come to The Shawl and have dinner
with Bruce; and, the afternoons he felt like it, he was to come to
Long Beach for bathing. In this way they planned to be as much
together as they would have been had Nathan remained at the inn.
Looking at the bus schedule, they saw that there were buses
leaving York Beach at 5:00 and 7:00 P.M., either of which Nathan
could use for coming, and one at 10:30 leaving Long Beach which
would get him back to York Beach fifteen minutes later.
Then Charles Shawl kindly placed his car at Antrum's dis-
posal, and offered to drive him to his hotel at whatever time he
said.
So, in mid-afternoon, with Antrum's baggage on board, they
made a speedy trip to York Beach.
The business of getting settled in his new place occupied Antrum
and prevented him from having marked reactions to the room.
He heard women on the porch talking, and knew that they heard
him stirring about; but did not particularly mind it. By the time he
had written several letters telling friends where he was, he had to
dress in a hurry and run to catch the seven o'clock bus.
Bruce told Nathan that the water had been fine, that he was sorry
he had missed it. Nathan told Bruce that he rather liked his new
place and was going to have an interesting time seeing what he could
do in the way of work, for the next week, with people pressing
close to him.
Antrum felt an animal gratefulness for the good dinner.
"By the way," he said to Bruce, "you came near putting me in
hot water last night."
"You!" exclaimed Bruce, and burst out laughing. "You? In
hot water? I wish I had. No chance. She didn't even ruffle you. I
don't know why, but she gets under my skin-and knows she
does."
"Which she?" asked Nathan.
"Is that a question, or do you want to start talking of Alma?”
"I wouldn't mind," said Nathan. "Where is she? I haven't seen
her tonight. You have all day, you know."
"I do not. We both have business."
"Yes, together. How long have you been here?"
"There she goes now," said Bruce, as Alma passed the door and
went out on the porch. "Shall we sit in here, or—”
"Let's," said Nathan.
"Which?" asked Bruce.
"Not sit here."
It was a fine night, clear and starry. A soft wind, carrying less
of the sea, more of summer growing things, fields and gardens, in-
vited them to breathe its fragrance. On one side of the shadowy
porch they could see a group of people, dim figures gathered round
a table on which an object rested. Soon they knew this was a
victrola. And soon too, by their tones of voice, they recognized
Alma and Charles Shawl. These latter, together with several others,
were preparing for a porch dance, though, as it turned out, Alma
was the only girl.
Bruce and Nathan took seats on the other side and divided their
awareness between responses to the night and attention to the
music, the sounds of dancing feet, and the high spirited voice of
Alma emerging from a background of male conversation and male
laughter.
They heard her say, playfully: "I'm looking for a good dancer."
After several rounds, breathless and exhilirated, she came towards
them and, after greetings, balanced herself on the porch railing
near them.
Antrum immediately suggested, in a clear low voice: "Perhaps
now you are in the vicinity of what you are looking for."
"I would not be surprised," she responded, archly. "But you can-
not tell a good dancer by looking at him."
"In which case," said Antrum with alacrity, “if you will, we will
have the next dance."
"Fast!" was Bruce's comment as he chuckled to himself.
They did. And it was not long before they affirmed delight in
it. Nathan felt her body soft and light, supple, firm, giving, essen-
tially a woman's body, with the flush loveliness of silk to touch.
The rhythms between them were graceful and delicate. The music
was jazz; but Antrum held her in tenderness.
"You look so serious," she said softly, "that I never would have
guessed."
"Have you never known a serious man who could dance?"
"Yes," she told him, "but I have never seen a man as serious as
you."
"Oh, I see!" he laughed.
After a pause, she asked: "Do you feel me trying to lead you?"
"No, I don't," he said. "Are you? Do you often take the lead?"
"The habit was formed in college-girls dancing together. I try
not to, when I am with a man.”
"Do you take the lead in other things?" he asked. "In life gen-
erally, I mean?”
"Sometimes," she answered. "Sometimes I have to."
"You like to?" he asked.
"Often I have to," she replied, indirectly.
One record ended, and, with gay salutes to Bruce, they put on
a second.
"You are having a good summer at York?" he asked her.
"Very good, thank you," was her reply.
"You should be, you are, I am sure, very capable at your work.
You find the inside life of an inn interesting?"
"Quite!"
"It leaves you time for other things?"
"Not much," she laughed.
"But when you find time, then what? What interests you?"
"Books," she answered. "What are you writing now?"
"And people?" he asked. "Or are you so at ease with people that
you only casually like them, rather than find them of special in-
terest?"
“Life interests me very much. I wonder about people."
"And about yourself?"
“The main puzzle,” she said, and gave a strange little laugh.
"You try to understand it?"
"Yes, I do," she replied. A grave and somewhat uncertain note
had come into her voice, suggesting that she was seriously con-
cerned with herself, and, at the same time, wished to avoid men-
tion of the subject. And then she said: "You have not told me what
you are writing."
"I will, if you would like."
The record ended. With gay sweeps they went towards Bruce
who arose and showed that he was about to ask for the next
dance. Just then Nathan glanced at his watch and saw that it was
past the time for his bus. So, bidding them a hasty goodnight, he
ran down the walk and then found that the green front lights of
the bus were not yet in sight. He had to wait five minutes.
There was no moon. The Shawl, almost phosphorescent, loomed
within darkness. He could see dark forms on the porch, Bruce
and Alma, passing before a lighted window, dancing.
When he reached it, the hotel was asleep, the porch before his
windows empty. So, stepping lightly so as not to disturb the people
in the next room, he slipped on a top-coat, went out, and pulled a
chair near to the porch railing.
How still and vast the night was. The bodies of men were quiet,
their consciousness asleep, gone into another dimension. The houses
of York Beach were regular forms of darkness. The ocean was
black. Waves rolled in, broke and churned against the rocks be-
neath him. The endless rhythms of the universe were in them.
One star was so bright and low on the night horizon that it cast
a trail of light across the waters.
Gazing contemplatively at the serene silvery black cosmos,
Antrum expanded and felt deep energies astir in him. For a long
while he sat there, thoughts and senses one, experiencing the being
of sheer sensibility.
He arose the next morning with a feeling of integration and
direction, the kind of feeling, or state, which usually presaged a
period of good work. His recognition of the state was accompanied
by an inward smile and nod of affirmation. It was as if he were
greeting an intimate friend. Something cautioned him to regard it
with a trace of skepticism; but he could see no reason for doing so.
For, after all, he was, it seemed, in first-rate general condition, and
the results of two days of effort were in his favor. Last night, the
close of it, had been wonderful; and he had slept in his new room,
thus giving to it his atmosphere. There was every reason why he
should be able to work today. Already his mind was active with
ideas.
With firm strides he went to try a place for breakfast, his first
breakfast in York Beach. The summer cottages he passed bid for his
interest, and so did the people and the waitresses in the restaurant
selected. They insisted that he see the kind of life which visited
York Beach. But, promising to attend to them later on when he
was well within his work, he cancelled their appeals and managed
to hold his mind within his own world. He did note, however,
the strength of his wish to keep York Beach out of him. Also, with
irritation, he noted his over-concern with his own state. He was
treating himself as if he were a psychological invalid.
Finished with breakfast, he arranged for a box in the post office,
and then returned straight to his room. Women were in chairs in
front of his windows. He felt a flash of angry annoyance, a touch of
constriction. Judging, however, that the clatter of a typewriter
would drown them out, and, at the same time provide him with the
means of an equivalent noisy self-assertion, he opened his machine
and set to work.
He worked all morning, with satisfactory results; and it was with
friendly eyes for York Beach-rather an attractive little place, in
some ways-that he strode down the gravelled walk for lunch.
The waitresses, he noticed, were rather pretty and quite animated.
They seemed to have a lot of fun in their work, informal but atten-
tive.
But, back in his room once again, a wave of fatigue and dryness
suddenly descended on him. He felt that all at once something
had been taken out of him, leaving him without energy, without
interest, without substance. Nothing seemed to have value. Not
himself, not his work, not life. Why this struggle? Why this goad
to build in emptiness?
Nevertheless for a short while he tried to work against this
state, carried on by the inertia of past strain. He succeeded only in
growing nervous. He was using cigarettes to stimulate himself. He
stopped it. Consciously relaxing, he reclined on his bed, head sup-
ported by an arm. His bed was a narrow little thing. He asked in
irritation why men, with the world full of soft fine stuffs, insisted
on having such uncomfortable sacks. He heard women talking.
He did not want to hear them. Damn them, he said. He tried to
read, and what he read sounded like pure nonsense. He gave up,
and let the bed hold him.
He was anxious for four o'clock, the time for seeing Bruce and
going bathing.
But before this time had come, he had gradually accumulated
enough energy to feel more himself again. So, rising from bed, and
noticing with relief, with a sense of liberation, that the porch was
temporarily deserted, he went out and occupied a chair. Well, he
told himself, what more could he expect? He had worked all
morning. Was not that enough? He could hardly ask to step imme-
diately into a full day's work.
And then, without him asking for it, his mind began clearly
thinking into the material, not of his slight article, but of the rather
serious book he had in preparation.
The scene which met his eyes, in contrast to the subject of his
book, a work dealing with certain of the personal and cultural prob-
lems of modern man, gave him an idea for an introduction. What
better way to begin such a book, he asked, than by creating the
sense of a world in which no problems exist? So he began writing:
As I begin this book I find myself contemplating a scene which
seems to say that neither I nor anyone need concern himself with
what men call human problems. Indeed, along this coast, the coast
of Maine, the sea and sky this afternoon as my gaze points through
them, oceanward, are so serene and of such amplitude that the
strange problems of man are cancelled and almost proved to be
impossible. Man and his works are made to take their places in a
scheme of Nature, in an order of Cosmos, so vast that one is forced
either to abstract all value from human problems or to class them
among the variety of strange illusions which we human creatures
inexplicably give rise to and perpetuate. In either case, the problems
themselves are stripped of their importance. Man's problems are
placed on a par with the problems of sea gulls. There seems to be
no necessity and no urgence to deal with them.
Below me, the rock coast forms a wall against which the waves
in unending series roll and break and dash their foam. The waves
are without nerves, without soul. No nerves cause the ocean to
feel fatigue and pain. Death is the premium men pay for having
nerves. And before death-problems. Sandpipers, grey, grey-white,
agile experts in securing food where a false wing would cause
death against rocks, seem problemless. No man is in the water.
There has been no shipwreck.
Yes, up the way a bit, where a beach shelves under the sea, I can
view the small figures of people bathing in the surf, shouting,
laughing. But neither there nor elsewhere in this serene world is
there anything which, to my senses, takes the form of a human
problem. I know, of course, that the people bathing have them. They
have money problems, sex, educational, political, religious—in fact,
they probably have, with personal variations, the entire scale of
man's main problems. But those in the hotel I do not see. And of
those bathing, nothing in their visible behavior gives evidence of
their existence. The movements of the bathers' arms and limbs re-
veal no concern greater than that displayed by the rhythms of the
surf.
Having written this much, Antrum's mind, like a balky engine,
stopped dead. And so, knowing better than to try to force it further,
he prepared to leave immediately for Long Beach.
Rather than take the bus he walked. The tide was out, and he
walked along the beach, not seeing the line of summer cottages, see-
ing only the ocean, feeling the resistance of an off-sea wind. His
body was active, springy, muscular. He was aware of a vital kin-
esthetic sense. The longer he walked the more his body pulsed with
blood. So changed was he, so energized, in such an up-mood, that
he had difficulty realizing that only a few hours ago he, the same
person, without energy, without interest, without substance and
value, had been lying flat on his back in an empty bloodless down-
mood. Sharp changes like this were characteristic of him.
Arriving at The Shawl in fine state, he found Bruce already out,
having tea. Bruce said the water was great, and mentioned that
Alma was still in bathing. Nathan needed no urging. Using Bruce's
room he hurriedly put on his suit and went to the beach.
Antrum looked well in his suit. His tall body was athletic, and
still showed traces of the time when its muscles were clean and
rippling. With shouts and raillery he joined Alma; and together
they sported in the surf, did stunts, swam out beyond the breakers,
and thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Now she was seeing still an-
other side of him, a joyous, spontaneous, boyish side, one which
she liked very much. She found herself wishing that they might
keep on playing and swimming forever.
Later on, at dinner, Nathan and Bruce both were in high spirits.
For the most part, they told each other stories, stories which, spoken
with low voice, were followed by peals of laughter that could be
heard all over the house.
When Alma came in for a short visit, she did not fail to mention
that she guessed what they had been up to, and felt slighted that
she had been left out. They promised that she would be included
in the next round.
Still later, now again to themselves, Bruce told Nathan of a letter
he had received from a man, a friend, whom he characterized as a
person whom life was forever kicking, who tried to kick back, who
always got the worst of it. This led to a change of tone towards
serious conversation.
"It seems," said Bruce, twisting in his chair, and showing that
he did not like the truth of it, "it seems that when life kicks you
-she is forever at it-she demands that you not kick back. If you
do kick back, you get the worst of it. You get two kicks for your
one, four kicks for your two. You've got to smile. At least, try to.
You've got to give pleasure for pain, beauty for ugliness, love for
hate. If you don't, she'll leave you alone, or break you. It is a
terrible thing."
"Yes, it is," said Nathan. "This it is to suffer." His voice was
vibrant, weighty, with a live body and deep psyche back of it. He
remained silent for a time, and when he next spoke his tone was
dominant and aggressive. "That's generally true. But I think, Bruce,
there are times and cases where you've got to strike. Not necessarily
strike back. Though that too. But initiate a strike. There are people
and circumstances with which you can do nothing, who will not
respect you unless you give them a clean hard blow. Then too, we've
got to be alert not to become negative towards negatives." He looked
as though he had in mind a concrete situation which had given rise
to just these issues. His eyes were narrowed, his jaw thrust for-
ward.
"No, Nathan," Bruce denied with feeling. "What would you have,
war to stop war, punishment to stop crime? That's what's the
matter with the world. Nobody can stop striking."
"Ah, yes," said Nathan, "quite true. But there is a difference
between mechanical blind blows--which are killing us—and in-
telligent hard strokes."
"But granting there is, which I doubt, how are we going to know
the difference?"
"Difficult, surely," said Nathan. "However, on the whole, and
in a very deep sense, I think you are right. We must contain our
poison. We must learn how to contain it. But we cannot contain it.
We do not know how. How are we to learn? Merely being passive
is not enough. In truth, being passive is being nothing. What's to
be done?"
"I don't know, Nathan. But I do know it must be done." As he
continued, he too seemed to have in mind a concrete case, and
looked pained. "People have tried to destroy me, deliberately set
out to destroy me. And I know that when I've tried to stop them,
tried to destroy them, I've only succeeded in tearing myself. They
have kept on, harder than ever, fed by my thrusts." Bruce's eyes
lowered. Then he looked up impulsively and asked: "What do
you think?"
"Several things," said Nathan. "In the first place, your problem
was not to control the other people, but to control their effects in
yourself." Then he moved his head skeptically, and continued:
"Perhaps we cannot contain poison because we do not know how
to transmute it into non-poisonous matter. We are full of it. It
has been pumped into us from birth onwards. It is deadly in us. We
have to let it out. We get an illusory sense of power in doing so.
The old revenge motive. Unable to transmute it, we, each one,
wants and aims to poison someone else. You know, a terrible
example. I know people who, having contracted venereal disease
from one person, aim to and do deliberately, out of vengefulness,
pass it on to the next. Man has a stubborn will to circulate poison.
We know it means destruction to the individual and to life in
general. Yet we keep on, powerless to reverse the process, in ignor-
ance of how to reverse it. Ah, we know how to transmit it. We are
diabolically expert. How to contain and transmute it? And most of
us, most of the so-called adults, are so far gone that we would be
unwilling to learn and try even if the opportunity were presented.”
Nathan's face was tensed, his lips turned with satiric bitterness.
Then he gradually relaxed and smiled, and looked at Bruce with
very warm affection. Bruce gave a deep sigh, a sound which came
from the very depths of him.
After a long silence they began talking again, but of lighter
matters; and so the time passed until Nathan's bus was due. It
was then that Bruce remembered to tell him that, the next day
being Sunday, dinner would be at 1:30, and that Mrs. Shawl had
invited the two of them to dine with her.
Antrum's Sunday morning was given deliberately to loafing. He
sunned on the rocks, watched two boats leave the harbor for deep
sea fishing, wished there was a sail which he could rent for a
month. He saw a number of people with long poles trying to catch
something from the edge of the rocks. People dressed for Sunday
leaving the hotel to attend the village church. Religion. The
twentieth century after Jesus Christ. He saw several rock spiders
darting among crevaces with alarming rapidity. Gulls, pure white,
glided overhead or rested upon the waves. A hollow booming sound
came from a rock whenever a wave pounded it. Many figures were
on the beach and in the surf. And, for a short while, far out to sea,
he saw a brilliant white speck, a white sail.
He was dressed in white trousers, a camel's hair coat, and a
tie of brilliant dark orange. The wind blew through his hair. His
skin was tanning.
At 1:30 he and Bruce went in to dine with Mrs. Shawl, her son
Charles, and Alma. This, for the present, was the family. But
Antrum was told that later on in August a number of others were
coming from New York, Chicago, and Oregon for a family re-
union. He looked forward to experiencing this reunion, for he felt
that it would occasion a fine spirit.
Mrs. Shawl, wearing embroidered white silk, her silvery hair in
a crown, her face deep glowing, was a warm and active hostess,
keeping them well supplied with all good things, among them
baked chicken, a specialty, prepared in a way quite new to Antrum.
She also kept going a lively round of conversation.
Charles tended to be silent, but it was evident that he never
missed a point. Alma was gay, and also dreamy. And it could be
seen that Bruce and Nathan were in playful rivalry to say the
best and wittiest things. Bruce in particular flashed a number of
remarks, apt images, brilliant turns of speech, which won laughter.
Books and authors were mentioned, opinions and impressions of
them. Bernard Shaw, Eugene O'Neill, John Dewey, Keyserling, D.
H. Lawrence. At length, Mrs. Shawl, saying that she wondered
how he stood with Bruce's group of writers, asked him what he
thought of H. L. Mencken.
Bruce looked at once amused and undecided. And then he ex-
pressed a number of things very rapidly to the effect that Mencken
lacked intuition, imagination, and aesthetic sense; and that, though
he did good work exposing and destroying stupidities and bigotries,
he had nothing constructive to offer. As for literature, Bruce said
he thought Mencken's range of appreciation quite limited; and
since he was the arch-enemy of whatever he did not like, and
since he did not like what many of the younger writers were doing,
or trying to do, he was the arch-enemy of much promising literature.
"What do you think, Nathan?" Bruce then asked.
"More or less what you do," said Antrum. "Mencken's attitude
to life seems to be that life is worthwhile provided that you find
it amusing. It is said that he advises people not to commit suicide
but to keep on living because otherwise they would miss seeing
the next amusing act of the show: the presidential elections, the
next war. Well," and Nathan smiled and shrugged his shoulders,
"that is one attitude. You could hardly call it a mature attitude.
Nor is it suited to leadership, to a man of Mencken's influence.
But also, by the way, Mencken works hard. He seems to find value
in hard work. In skilled work. Provided that the work is pro-
ductive, there are not many better values. And then you know,
Mencken does his share of clear headed thinking." He glanced at
Alma and then continued: "I remember reading not long ago an
article of his on the marriage question. He was discussing com-
panionate marriage. Towards the end he said, I think, something
like this: that marriage is a form of union between man and
woman which implies and necessitates a deliberate surrender of
certain so-called liberties in order that the two people, with mutual
trust, may feel mutually secure. It is, in a sense, a formal recogni-
tion of mutual trust. A formal agreement that the two people will
forego certain things so that they can feel secure in starting and
building a life together. If this is so-and I think it is-then there
can be no companionate marriage. There can be marriage. There can
be 'companionate.' But it must be companionate something else.
Well," said Antrum, "when Mencken singled out trust and a
sense of security as two of the essentials of marriage, it seems to
me that he touched true ones. And in showing the companionate
project to be something not marriage, he cleared the way for
intelligent discussion of it. It was a short article, but a piece of ex-
pert thinking and writing."
Mrs. Shawl nodded agreement.
Alma frowned and said thoughtfully: "It is a difficult situation.
I wonder how men and women allowed themselves to drift into it.
Didn't they see the home breaking? Why can't men and women
live together any more?"
"The War, and after the War," said Bruce. "It happened sud-
denly."
Nathan smiled strangely and asked Alma: "You have heard
that there are such things as human types?"
"Yes," she said, "I have, but I don't know anything about them."
"And that there is such a thing as correspondence between types,
and lack of correspondence?"
"Yes, something about it."
"And that an exact knowledge of human types is possible?"
"No, I've never heard that," said Alma.
"Bruce has," said Nathan, “but he is skeptical."
"No I am not skeptical, Nathan," Bruce denied, with a touch of
heat.
"Well, Alma," Nathan went on, "I have reason to believe that
such knowledge does exist, and that those who possess it know,
among other things, the types of men and women who belong
together, and the types who do not. And also, I have reason to
believe that this knowledge is available. But we may be sure
of one thing, which is, that knowledge of this kind will be the last
thing sought by supposedly intelligent men and women. They will
go to all lengths to invent fantastic and absurd ways and means,
but they will not turn one step in the direction of useful under-
standing, even though the possibility of it were presented to them
on a silver plate."
Alma was inwardly disturbed by his apparent cynicism. “Why,”
she asked, "why do you think that?"
"Because I cannot think otherwise," he answered. "Man has
been at it-I cannot say living-for thousands of years, and here
we are, not knowing, not yet having learned how to build and
maintain the simplest unit of human relationship. But there is no
end to the number and endurance of our inhuman relationships."
He paused, took a deep breath, and then said: "Ah, well, one
other person is enough to make life sweet. And there are a sufficient
number of such people." He smiled and added: "Bruce there,
Bruce falls in love with all New York when he loves one woman."
The company laughed, not at Bruce, but because it wanted to
laugh. Bruce, brighter than they, chuckled with the others.
Mrs. Shawl thought this a good note on which to leave the table
and go to the porch.
Alma as usual took her place balanced on the porch railing, head
against a post. Mrs. Shawl occupied a rocking chair. Charles excused
himself to attend to business. Nathan and Bruce each had a
corner of the porch-swing.
The mid-afternoon sun was on the other side of the house, but
to the front and rear it was full upon the lawns and gardens. The
earth droned in August. The heat was indifferent. Everything
seemed latent, in an interval between conception and birth. Things
grew, but they had already been planted, and were not yet ripe for
harvest.
A large number of motor-cars were on the road. Weekenders
could be seen in nearby cottages, wearing bathing suits of brilliant
reds and greens and blues. Some were going to the beach, some
leaving it. Other guests at The Shawl passed in and out the main
door. They smiled, but moved slowly.
It began to feel like Sunday afternoon.
After half an hour of pleasant talk Mrs. Shawl said she must go
in and see how things were running; and Bruce remembered the
letters he had to write. So these two left the porch, Alma and
Nathan remaining.
For a while they were silent, Nathan watching Alma as she
balanced there, body relaxed, spirit dreaming, her eyes far off in
space. And then he asked her:
"What do you see out there?"
"A face."
"Suppose you look the other way, then what do you see?”
"A face."
"The same face?"
She said yes.
For a while they were silent.
"Each time when your body is still, do you dream the same
dream?"
"The same dream."
"How far away is he?"
"Too far for a dream to reach."
"And if he were here, would he and the dream touch?"
She looked at Nathan, then shook her head and said: "I do not
think so."
Again they were silent. Then Antrum arose, went towards, and
stood near her. Looking clear into her eyes he held before her an
open up-turned palm. For a moment she hesitated, and then placed
her hand with confidence softly within it. His fingers closed ten-
derly.
"You are lovely."
Delicately she flushed.
"The night we danced together-I have never felt a woman's
body more lovely."
She flushed deeper, and then asked: “Did it surprise you?"
"Less than a serious man dancing surprised you. Yes and no. My
senses expected it. But my mind had seen you so active and
efficient."
And then he began to sense a strange uncertain actively wavering
vibration between them. He became aware of what seemed to be
two different sets of rhythms. One, was the rhythm of a direct
and lovely contact. This was the one he had felt deeply when she
first placed her hand in his. And now there was this other one, this
uncertain wavering rhythm which was, he sensed, the more basic
of the two. Becoming aware of it gave him an instant understanding
that fundamentally there was a strangely acute difference between
their vibrations.
"You seem to contain," he said, “a number of surprisingly dif-
ferent features."
"Do I?" she asked, and, for a moment, seemed worried. "What
are they? I'd like to know."
"Then suppose we use the swing? A little better than standing
here?"
When they were in the swing he said: "Well, you know," and
smiled, “you are quite a dreamer. No one would think it if they
saw your body moving. But a number of times I have noticed you.
come to a sudden stop in your active self, and immediately there-
after you not only begin dreaming, you become lost in dream. And
not only is the active world forgotten, but you do not even hear
conversation directed at you. Even at the table today, with the
dinner going on, with gay talk all about you, you would enter it
for a while and then suddenly be gone far off completely in an-
other world."
"Is it that marked, that obvious?" she asked, flushing slightly.
"It is certainly evident, but whether most people see it or not-"
"I wonder. Some do not. Some of my best friends have never
seen it, and have never understood me. They think I am all active,
or. . . . And one or two think I am all dreamer. It's odd." She
lowered her face in a puzzled, half embarrassed way.
"The men you have known," he asked, "have they known how to
be active with Alma active, to be imaginative with Alma dream-
ing?”
She lifted her open eyes to his.... But before she could reply
in words, a voice from inside the house called her and she had to
hastily excuse herself and go in.
He saw the very thing he had been talking about happen, only,
it was the other way around. Alma dreaming suddenly became
Alma active. With him, her interior self had begun to live. Now,
responding to the call, as she walked down the porch and turned
in the door, with a wave to him, she was, he saw, Alma, the brisk
stepping, well set up, capable young woman.
A few moments later Bruce came out onto the porch and sug-
gested that instead of going into the water they take a walk along a
country road to York Village where he, Bruce, among other things,
could post his letters. This, they did.
Nathan was again delighted to experience the aliveness of Bruce's
senses, the unconscious poetry of Bruce's response to Nature. Bruce
seemed to register everything: the trees were living individuals to
him; the flowers; an inland pool surrounded by tall grass with a
slight mist hovering over it; the flight of a heron; the rhythms of
fields and cleared spaces; the subtle hues of the changing sky as
the sun sloped towards sunset. Bruce felt beauty everywhere and
gave Nature the response of wonder.
Antrum, not greatly in love with Nature, loved it through Bruce.
And, as they walked along, Nathan at the same time was
thinking of his experience with Alma. One thing he knew very
definitely: she evoked in him a wish. But as he thought of it, it
seemed that the wish was not for her. Though she evoked it, it
seemed that she, personally, was not its object. It was as if she
stood for something else, a symbol of something he strongly de-
sired. She attracted him. They attracted each other. But as symbols
attract. Yes, he liked her very much. She was a woman, and lovely.
But this wish, active in him now, was somehow not for her. What
was it for? Or was his sense of it a faulty sense? Was it for her?
He began to see numerous signs of a phase of apparent non-
fulfilment. Doubtless he was in such a phase. Perhaps Alma, his
experience with her, was to be a significant part of it. He and
the earth both were in August.
They were entering York Village, a town of New England, with
quiet streets, lovely old trees, a restored 17th century church, two
cemeteries, one dating from far back, and white houses surrounded
by shrubbery and lawns behind whose cool walls one could imagine
people living the entire cycle of their earth-experience. It was very
different from York Beach.
Bruce mailed his letters, and then, without lingering, they turned
about and began walking home. At another time they would pay a
longer visit to the village.
On the porch that evening, Alma sat between Bruce and Nathan
in the swing. The men were aware of a friendly rivalry between
them for her attention. But feeling ran deeper. Here for the first
time in a serious form they sensed her presence evoking the old
old triangle.
Monday morning saw Antrum again in harness, trying to work.
He tried to bring his best forces to bear on the manuscript of his
serious book. He tried to carry on and finish the introduction begun
two days ago. He got nowhere.
Deciding that this was too heavy a task, or, rather, that he was
too sluggish for it-he felt out of contact with the world of ideas,
out of contact with feeling-he then attempted to write just one
page of his small article.
Five women were on the porch near his windows. In a flash of
anger he crumpled a page of scribbling and hurled it at a window.
He smoked cigarettes. He quit his writing-table and reclined on
the bed. He got up from bed and strode out on the porch. He gazed
at the sky. His face scowled. He saw one woman, an amiable ma-
tronly looking person, smiling pleasantly at him, nodding the day's
greetings. He smiled back at her as pleasantly as he could. After
all, he told himself, these are good kindly folk. Don't project your
distemper onto them. But, not being free to hate them, he soon left
the porch, took writing materials from his room, and went down
to the hotel's main sitting-room.
People saw him enter and nodded good morning. He nodded
back. People saw him trying to write. He saw people trying to
play bridge and watch him at the same time. He got up and left
the sitting-room. Once again he sat at his writing-table. His tense
face scowled. He felt scorn for his own inability to work the ma-
chine called Nathan Antrum. He felt contempt for the world's
idling people. He began satirizing, not the women outside his win-
dow, but just some people in general who thought they were having
a great time taking a summer vacation.
That afternoon he tried to work. The following morning he tried
to work. Unable to do so, his wish to work grew very intense. Its
intensity produced physical heat. Every inch of him seemed bent on
producing one page of literature.
He did work a little, and then had to stop. He started, stopped.
Started, stopped. Until, finally, an outburst of bitter fury which in-
cluded Bruce, Alma, York Beach, the state of Maine, America, the
ocean's moisture, and his own mechanicality, counselled him to
apply intelligence to the situation.
He was quite aware that the main factors of the situation were
already known to him. He had wished to disregard them. And, dis-
regarding them, he had been brought to the present turbulent
state. Well then, what he had to do was to summarize the factors,
realize them, and adopt towards them a constructive workable
attitude. The minute he decided to do this, he felt inwardly calm;
and he found that for this purpose his mind was at his service. It
was as if his mind, freed from his coercion, knew with what
materials to function.
The plain fact was, he summarized, that York Beach was either
already in him, or that York Beach demanded open entrance to
his consciousness. That his own world was either already displaced,
or must be displaced, for the time being. He must incorporate new
materials. Not only York Beach, but something in himself, some
phase of his own development evidently demanded that the life
of York be taken in by him, digested, assimilated, understood,
accepted, transmuted. The experience of York Beach insisted on
being accepted and spiritualized.
Opposed to this insistence was his own wish to work. It was in
order to work that he had come to York. He wished to follow his
prearranged plan. In attitude, he had no objection to trying to
understand and spiritualize the experience of York. In fact, taken
by itself, he affirmed this effort. Often he had made this effort in
other places and at other times. And in general he always aimed
to open himself to experience with the aim of discovering its signifi-
cance. Indeed, before coming to York, he had asked: "What mean-
ing for me at York Beach?" But just at this time he had no wish,
he had not felt the need for new experience of the kind which
York provided. Or, rather, he did not wish this experience to
dominate him. It was the threat of its domination that he had been
struggling against. He wished to work. He had much to do. If he
were working, he would gladly accept York Beach. He would
gladly accept work and York together. But he had, he realized,
been strongly opposed to surrendering work, the kind he had
planned, in total favor of York experience. His wish to prescribe
for himself had strongly opposed itself to York's insistence.
Well, he could not work, that is, not for the time being, not as
he had planned. Each day York grew stronger. Well, after all,
perhaps some deeper and more necessary purpose, a purpose which
he could not see, would be served if he accepted York, positively,
entirely. In truth and fundamentally, he was igorant of the forma-
tions and transformations needed by him. Life worked; his little
mind would do well if it continuously observed what it could. At
any rate, there seemed to be no alternative. Yes, leave York. Go
elsewhere. But he knew quite certainly that he had no intention of
leaving it. It challenged him. He was going to stay and see it
through.
However, though he would modify his plans and demand less of
himself, he would by no means give up efforts to work. These also
seemed necessary, an integral and inevitable part of the general
pattern. So it was. Together with what work he could do, he
would voluntarily open himself to York's impressions. Yes, he
would take them.
He glanced around his small cramped room. He said to himself:
"You can no more impose your plans and wishes on life than you
can impress beauty on this room."
He heard his neighbors in the next room moving about. And
he could not help wondering according to what fate, for what ob-
jective, he, of all people, had been led to and deposited in this
place. He glanced through the curtains of his window and saw the
women on the porch. Were they similar to the shore-dwellers? If
so, he was amongst them, jammed as close to them as they, along
the road, were jammed to the road.
He smiled ironically and said to himself: "A trap. Antrum's sum-
mer trap. It has been waiting for me more than thirty years. Well,
it has caught me. And here I find myself at the bottom of life, di-
rectly opposite to what my wish for a brilliant summer pictured.
Work be damned!" Then, bitterly-"What mockery! Where oh
where, sweet youth, is the perfect place! Yea, the perfect place for
the perfect idiot!" And then, with stoic knowing-“So, Nathan.
Cause and effect begin and end in yourself."
CHAPTER IV
As a result of Antrum's conscious recognition of the situation, as
a result of his new attitude both towards his wish to work and
towards York experience, his urgence to work diminished, and, at
the same time, York Beach became less insistent. What he wished to
do retained its value but ceased to goad him. The life of York re-
tained its character but ceased to constrain him. This coincidence of
diminished pressure from the inside and from the outside let him
see at once that it was largely his own subjective state which had
caused York experience to seem so pressing. This did not mean
that York was not pressing. It was. For him, dwelling in it, it was
the kind of place which would have been insistent whatever his
state. The simple fact that he was he, that York Beach was as it was,
meant that there must be some degree of friction between them. But
he recognized without doubt that the intensity of this friction had
resulted from the intensity of his nonfulfilled wish to think and
write. For now, as his internal feeling of urgence diminished, so did
York's threat of domination.
Antrum was so constituted, however, his sense of the amount of
work he wished to do, and of the short time he had in which to
accomplish it, was so great, that he could not be patient with pro-
tracted periods of comparative nonproductivity. In time, and in
short time, York Beach or no York Beach, and whatever the de-
mands of the situation, he would again experience an ever in-
creasing need to consciously continue actualizing the forms he had
in mind. One of these forms, the main one, was the perfected form
of himself. Relative to this form, his books were by-products.
But, for a period of several days, there was a general lessening
of pressure. Antrum found himself in a calm, almost serene, faintly
smiling, interested state. Towards himself he was less a taskmaster,
more a genial friend; and, well disposed towards himself, he be-
came well disposed towards York Beach and life.
When he could work, he did so. Sometimes it was in his room;
sometimes on the rocks; once or twice in the hotel's main sitting-
room. He came to know a number of people by their names, found
them, in their ways, quite human and interesting, and had good
words for them. They felt he was a bit strange and aloof; but
accepted him as such, and took him to be an odd part of their
summer vacation.
When he could not work, he made contacts with York Beach.
He had a sense that never at any time had it been other than
a summer place. So he made inquiries into its history. What in-
formation he could gather confirmed his belief that it had never
been a real port. Unlike Tennant's Harbor and many of the Maine
coast towns before iron and steam introduced modern power pro-
pelled vessels, York Beach, it seemed, had never had a shipyard; its
harbor had never seen schooners; its shores had never housed sail-
makers and sea captains. Nor had it been a fishing village. Though
on the sea, it had never given rise to sea life.
Nor did Antrum think it had ever been agricultural. The land
around did not look fertile, and, in general, there was something
about the place which suggested its lack of contact with all forms
of human productivity. He learned, however, that there had been
farms; that, indeed, several of the shore hotels stood on what had
been farm sites. He was told that one of the hotel proprietors had
been born and reared on the farm which lay, as it were, under his
present hotel. This man loved York Beach. It was his home. And,
quite aside from the fact that he made his living from the hotel, he
had a genuine attachment to the place itself, preferring to live in
York far more than in any other place. Antrum felt respect for
this man's feelings. He had respect for the feelings of whoever
experienced a real affection for the place. He hoped they would
understand that though on occasion he might satirize it, this satire
was his feeling of it, one of his feelings; and that, in expressing it,
he had no wish to violate their feelings.
But York's farm period had passed away many years ago; and
since that time it had in fact been a summer resort, going through
the ups and downs, the phases of popularity and disfavor usual to
such places. Just now, following a slump, it was rapidly gaining
in public favor, owing in large measure to an active Chamber of
Commerce which year by year was improving business conditions.
This accounted for the liveliness in its streets.
Antrum was told that its population in summer was three thou-
sand, in winter, three hundred.
At odd times he walked about the different sections: the business
district, the outlying sections, the open public space in front of the
beach, and observed its shops, houses, and various forms of life.
He noted two tailor shops which seemed to be doing good busi-
ness; a dry goods store; a barber shop; several grocery stores; a
drug store; two bowling alleys, one of which was popular, having
people in it day and night; and, together with the movies, the candy
shop, and the Great White Way, to make the thing complete, the
stand of a woman palm-reader and clairvoyant.
On the ocean front there was a band stand, where, during the
height of the season, concerts were given twice a day.
There was an active fire department. It came out often and
paraded the streets to boost business for benefit dances.
Most of the smaller summer cottages had names. These names,
painted on signs the worse for wear, were in full view, usually
posted over the entrance to the porch. Antrum made quite a collec-
tion of them: "Seldom In," "Do Drop Inn," "Grand View," "Ocean
Spray," "Nakomis," "Kippy-Nee," "Cove View," "Little Den,"
"U-All-No," and many others. The larger boarding houses and
hotels had regular and imposing names: "The Arlington,” “The
Hiawatha."
One sign, a home-made advertisement, caught his attention. It
appeared regularly each Thursday and was taken in Saturday eve-
nings. It was posted on the lawn of a clean and shapely little house.
Scrawled in uneven letters on a sort of blackboard, the sign read:
Order Your Beans and Brown Bread now
for Saturday
And, among the numerous professional advertisements of the
movies, benefit dances, and so on, one day a notice of particular
interest to him appeared. It announced a contest in the dance pavil-
lon to decide and proclaim, first prize, second prize, third prize—
Miss York Beach. It was, he recognized, similar to proclamations
elsewhere. Cities and towns the length and width of America were
electing their representatives. There was, he knew, a Miss Chicago,
A Miss America. Nay more, a Miss Universe. Indeed he had seen,
driving through the streets of Chicago, passing up Michigan Boule-
vard, escorted by a squadron of motorcycle police, amid much
demonstration-Miss Universe.
Of evenings when he went to The Shawl, Nathan would tell
Bruce of the new things he had discovered at York Beach. On one
or two occasions Bruce was much amused to see Nathan growing
enthusiastic about it, becoming, as Bruce said with a twinkle, a
regular York Beacher.
And also, Antrum was carefully observing the people, the types
at York. In restaurants he would linger over coffee, seeing those
who came in, and those who passed the windows. During walks. On
the beach. And he made particularly good use of the women on
the porch before his windows. Instead of resenting them, or of
fuming because he was hedged in so close to them, at odd times
he listened attentively to what they were saying.
He could not help but characterize them as too dull to be bored.
Their conversation consisted in telling where they had come from,
and often asking: "Is that so? Do you know so and so?” “How do
you like this place?" They would discuss the hotel, and, if they
had been to York before-a number had-they would tell where
they had stayed during previous visits, and compare hotels. They
made comments on the good air, the fine view, the number of people
in bathing, a boat in the harbor, an airplane ride which some
younger person had taken. If it was hot, they would say it was
hot, and then express the hope that it would soon cool off.
Their main topic, however, was food. Mornings, afternoons, and
evenings, these ladies talked of food. They would wander off on
some othe matter, and then, invariably, come back to food. They
told each other where they had found good food, where they had
found the best food. There were many comparisons of eating
places. They offered criticisms of the coffee and tea served. Differ-
ent restaurants, it seemed, were better for the different meals. One
place served good breakfasts, but poor or indifferent dinners and
suppers. Another place, the reverse. And so on. They discussed in
detail what they got at the various meals. The rolls, the eggs, the
bacon. The chowder, the fish, the meats, the chicken. They men-
tioned the annoyances and pleasures of eating away from home.
The price, size, and quality of pies. Constant, unending talk of
food. Desserts. What places had the best desserts. "How much do
they serve?" "Does such and such a place give extra helpings?"
Some places did, and some places did not.
Their talk had sluggish refinement. They were, in a sense, gentle-
women. But when Antrum saw, that is, visualized, behind their
words, the actual quantities of food they ate, and when moreover he
recognized that their overwhelmingly main concern was eating, to
him their talk assumed rather monstrous vulgar proportions. For
he could see: without gusto, without great relish, without keen
hunger or sharp appetite, but simply as something to do to kill
time and then talk about, food in quantities entering them only to
overweigh and clog them. The process itself, plus their talk, became
in his eyes and feelings a kind of unconscious obscenity.
Often he registered their behavior without comment. It was
simply to be observed that they did behave so. Sometimes he
satirized them. Now and again he felt sharp pain to think that
these women were the dull adult resultants of vivid and promising
childhood. That they were human beings, containing in germ the
potentials of marvelous womanhood. At other times they were ob-
jects of sadness. One woman in particular impressed him so.
She was a slight woman, a trifle beyond middle age, her hair grey-
ing, her face with rather sensitive fine lines. She sat with the other
women but was inclined to be withdrawn and silent. Now and
again she would say something. Her usual way of entering the con-
versation was by suddenly laughing, and then suddenly becoming
silent again. She rocked. And as she rocked, an undertone of sound
came from her, a sort of croon. Always, unless she laughed, this
croon came from her. To Antrum it sounded like a strange monot-
onous lullaby. Sitting in a rocker, on a canvass covered porch, look-
ing over the sea, a middle-aged maiden, amid the buzz of summer
chatter, to herself crooning a lullaby to a baby never to be born.
As Antrum continued gathering impressions of the people of
York Beach, singly, and in groups, he began sensing in them a
quality which, to his mind, was novel and unique. Just what this
quality was, he could not at first tell. In the majority of people it
existed, he was sure; but it was not sufficiently defined for him to
see. He sensed its presence, but could not isolate it. He knew, how-
ever, that it was a quality of human life which never before in his
experience had presented itself in this manner. He did not think
it was, in a strict sense, unique to York Beach. Nor did he think it
was altogether novel to him. But it showed in these people, and
impressed him in a way to make it seem altogether singular.
For several days he was in curious doubt about it. The quality
itself, and his search to isolate it, intrigued him. He was baffled.
It was, it seemed, as plain as the nose on your face, and yet he
could not see it satisfactorily. One day, however, he had oppor-
tunity to observe it in so pure a form that all doubt was removed.
He was having lunch in a small restaurant, the most popular
place at the Beach. Its walls and ceiling were of plain wood painted
white, clean and cheerful. All the tables were occupied. The wait-
resses were moving rapidly back and forth. There was a thick but
not unpleasant atmosphere of food and humanity. A medley of
sounds: human voices, clinking plates and knives and forks. A mis-
cellany of young men drifted in to sit on stools at the counter and
order pie and coffee.
For some while he had been eating, not taking particular notice
of the people about him. The family was seated directly in front of
him, at the next table. His eyes must have looked at them any
number of times before his sight registered their presence. When
it did, he felt inside him a strange thud.
A family of four, father, mother, and two daughters of nearly
the same age, perhaps eighteen and nineteen. The mother had her
back towards Antrum. She more than filled the chair and gave
the impression of being very solid. Her hair was greying. Her
short plump neck, seen from the back, was pink, and white in the
creases. She had been in the sun a good deal, not tanning, but
growing redder, boiled lobster color. Across from her and facing
Antrum the two daughters sat. They sat stolidly, side by side. Their
flesh bloomed rawly. They were growing up to be just like their
mother. Their faces were large, plump, with rounded strawberry
checks and small noses, healthy and shiny. They said nothing.
The mother ate her lunch. And they, stiff in their chairs, stolidly
ate their lunch.
The father was at the head of the table. He was decidedly less
rubicund than the women, but his bones were thick and heavy
and he seemed to weigh in his seat. He sat in shirt sleeves, and, with
slow stiff awkward movements, each one like the other, regular
and monotonous, shovelled in food. His skin was grey and sallow.
His colorless eyes sank back in his head, making deep sockets.
There was quite a distance between his horn-rimmed glasses and his
eye sockets. His nose was blunt and dull. His lips looked as though
they never touched anything. His expression, a blank, sightless thing,
told that he neither tasted nor felt anything. His hair was stringy,
greying. His chest was caved in, yet it was a deep chest. He was,
however, clean washed, laundered, and shaven. There was a trace
of sluggish gentility about him. He ate.
They were silent. Not a word had they spoken. The two girls and
their father kept their eyes lowered on their plates, eyes too vacant
to see the plates. But now and again, perhaps every three minutes,
the mother turned her head to glance at a woman sitting at an-
other table to the side of her. When she did turn, Antrum could see
her side face. In profile, it looked exactly like a hen's. The same
glittering eyes, the same intense stupidity. The family neither spoke
to nor looked at each other.
They were not angry. Irritation would have caused some show
of tension, some sort of animation. Nothing was in them. Noth-
ing passed between them to induce even the flicker of an expres-
sion. They were having lunch one noonday during their summer
vacation.
The more Antrum looked, the more amazed he became. He began
feeling that their bland, stolid, stupid existence had qualities of the
absolute and of the eternal.
He asked himself what occupation the man could be engaged in.
What could he do to earn enough money to support himself, much
less a family? He was not a farmer. He was too genteel and far
too inactive to be able to make money farming. He was not a
mechanic. Not alert and skilled enough. Certainly he was not in
business for himself. When compared with him, the business men
of York Beach looked clever and energetic. He might be engaged
in an unskilled job in a mill. Perhaps he was an underclerk in an
office. At any rate, some job which required no intelligence, no
initiative, no responsibility. And yet, here he was with a family and
motor-car, off vacationing.
A cow has lovely eyes and is curious as to who passes, so Antrum
commented. The eyes of this family were flat and vacant with a
glittering sheen so evidently a thing of the organs themselves that
the absence of inner light was shockingly apparent. They were curi-
ous as to nothing.
A sea gull squaks and flies and dives for fish.
A dog shows all manner of sense and expressiveness.
This human family was unique in Nature.
During the time Antrum sat there, save for their shovellings of
food, he saw and heard but one single sign of life from them. Out
of silence, out of nowhere, the older daughter, with hardly a
movement of her head, in a voice no more than a mumble, said:
"I get a headache if I don't keep my hat pulled down.”
The younger sister turned and looked blankly at her. The mother
glanced at the woman at the next table. The father shook his head
once, and then mumbled a few broken words which Antrum could
not hear. That was all.
The meal continued. They sat in heavy silence. They did not
appear to notice each other again.
For the rest of the time Antrum saw them, their dull, stupid
immobility glittered and was absolute.
He left them sitting there, his own state one of sheer amazement
at the quality he had at last succeeded in isolating.
Antrum had no special plan of observation, but he noticed that,
already having a sense of the nature of York Beach, he was pro-
gressing from the particular to the general, from single people to
groups of people, from groups to the form and content of York
Beach as a whole.
Of particular people there were a number, among them, the maid
who attended to his room, a young woman who lived not far from
York and who in the winter taught school. It was from her he
received an expression which hit off the attitude of millions of
Americans. She had been telling him of a motor ride she had taken,
and to his question: "Do you like to drive?" she had replied: "Why
sit when you can go?"
Then there was the proprietor of his hotel, a fine genial character
whose home was Maine. Several of the hotel guests with whom he
sometimes sat on the porch and talked. One of the bus drivers, a
lively fellow with the devil in him. He drove the coach in an expert
and racy way and had the girls crazy about him. A waitress or two.
A clerk in the drug store where he bought cigarettes. And a number
of others.
Among the groups there was the group of women on the porch
in front of his windows.
The business people of York. They were active, up-and-coming,
and seemed to be having a good season. They were friendly towards
each other, and gave the people of York fair goods at moderate
prices. They were, of course, sold to the idea of American pros-
perity, of progress, of making money and feeling secure.
Then there were the young fellows who frequented the bowling
alleys and the dance casino. In their way, they were healthy and
engaging, appeared to have much leisure, and were looking for a
good time. They wanted money enough to have this good time.
Later on, when married and older, they would doubtless swing into
the current of business life which applauds money-success and con-
demns money-failure.
The waitresses were an interesting group. To Antrum they
seemed to have more life and intelligence than the others. They
were, without doubt, superior to the majority of the people they
served. He learned that those at one restaurant were college girls
earning money for the next year and having an interesting vacation
at the same time.
The York natives were comparatively few. But they too seemed
to be made of better human stuff than the visitors.
Of those at the hotels and boarding houses, there were the regular
guests, people who stayed a week or longer; the transients or over-
night guests; and the week-enders. He learned that most of them
came from Massachusetts, though some were from other places in
Maine, some from New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, New
York, Washington, D. C., and from mid-western cities.
Not a few of the people who worked in York made the now
established migration back and forth between northern summer
resorts and southern winter resorts.
Antrum was not surprised to learn that many of those who were
making money in York looked down on the place. If asked how
they liked it, or if they lived there the year round, they let it be
seen that, at least in their own opinions, they came from decidedly
better places.
And yet, the whole town had an air of honest amiable democ-
racy. There seemed to be no differences of social class. All were
more or less of the same class: an easy mixing middle class. There
was no social pretense. No one, or very few, were, or strove to be
above this class. No one was, or allowed himself to be placed below
it. There was no domineering, and no cringing. No giving of
orders, no servility. Doubtless the transient nature of the place,
together with the types who came to it, had much to do with allow-
ing this condition to exist. At any rate, it seemed and was in fact
far more honestly democratic than most of the American towns
Antrum had experienced.
And it was a clean place, clean physically and socially. So far as
he could see, there was no flagrant hypocrisy, no concealed vice.
During the entire time he stayed there he saw no fights, no drunk-
enness, no animosities. Doubtless there was bootleg somewhere, but
he saw no signs of it. Doubtless there were ugliness, trickery, back-
kniving, and the multitude of other vicious pastimes. But if so, he
never witnessed them, nor did he have cause to think that they
existed in any continued or widespread form. It had a certain cheap-
ness, and, from his point of view, a lack of inner life and of human
atmosphere. And it was a transient summer place, what he had
called it: a money-resort. But on the whole... Yes, concluded
Antrum, York Beach is an honest, clean, and amiable little town.
As such, he accepted it. His relations with it were easy and
friendly; and, after a period of a few days, he found himself pleas-
antly human. He was, he observed, less an Ishmael, less with his
hand against every man, and every man's hand against him; less
urged to struggle; more directly naturally openly human than he
had been in years. He smiled to himself and said that it was good
for his pride and sense of isolation to take a vacation. At any rate,
for a short while, he was a simple human being, participating with
simplicity in the life of other human beings. And at the same time
observing both himself and them.
Of course he did not, not in an actual outward sense, participate
in the life of York Beach. It, as a whole, was a collective place, its life
was the life of mass-men, its psychology was mass psychology. It
had its wishes, its likes and dislikes, its aims and objectives. He was
an individual, or, an individual in the making. As he came to know
people better, as he grew to be a recognized figure in York, he
began to see and to sense the subtle tensions caused by his indi-
vidualistic position.
It was all under the surface. No casual observer could have
noticed it. To all appearances, and to a large measure in fact, his
relation with York was one of mutual friendliness, without tension.
At no time was there conflict or open opposition. There were no
acute turns to his position simply because there were no active or
frictional issues in which, opposed to them, he was involved. But
he, consciously, and York Beach unconsciously, knew that he was
different, that there was a difference between himself and it.
He could sense in the atmosphere and almost hear them asking:
"What are you doing here? Are you married? Where is your wife?
Where is your girl-friend? Where are your friends? Why are you
alone? Where is your car? Why haven't you got a car? We never
see you at the movies. We never see you at the dances. You look as
though you have money enough to be at a better place. Why are
you here? What are you doing? You are not one of us. Who are
you, anyway?"
Antrum devoted much thought to understanding the psychology
of the situation. It seemed to him that the stage was set cleanly. In
fact, never before had he found himself in a situation of mass and
individual so clear of extraneous factors. Here, there were no hos-
tilities, no contentions, no issues, no rivalries, none of the usual pref-
erences and prejudices. He liked them. They liked him. It was a
clear-cut proposition, the best experience he had had for observing
the reactions and interactions between an individual and the mass.
It seemed to him that the straight fact of his being alone, with-
out evident connections with any of the prevalent forms of life,
presented to the people of York Beach an image of a solitary per-
son, an individual, one who is individual among men. Not a hermit
or a recluse, who may be and most often is a mass-man who hap-
pens to dwell physically separate from men, but who, psychologi-
cally, is part of them. The true individual is psychologically indi-
vidualized. He vibrates differently. The mass senses this. How
different these vibrations were, if, for instance, they were radically,
basically different, Antrum questioned but could not determine. But
it was certain that the mass felt his dissimilar vibrations, and that
their feeling, though unconscious, was an active energy.
He was a symbol of something different from them. With the
quickness and certainty of symbolic understanding, they knew he
was different. This led them to question, with a tinge of suspicion,
as to who he was. When no satisfactory answers were forthcoming,
their vagueness began to fill with suspicions which, in time, would
turn to superstitions. In his present circumstance, this latter process
would be modified by their mutual friendliness. But the tensions
were there. They set up in his solar plexus subtle currents and
cross-pulls which would have caused a less conscious and a less
individualized person either to leave York Beach or to make quick
effort to be included amongst and accepted by the mass as one of
them.
He had occasion to notice one very interesting thing; which was,
that as long as he, as it were, kept on his side of the fence-they
invariably kept on theirs-everything was all right. He could chat
pleasantly with this person and that person about the weather, the
water, or what not. And so on. But if he in some subtle or obvious
way crossed over into their psychology and really gave them a
feeling of himself, if ever so slight, there was immediate and evident
disturbance. They would make quick nervous gestures, speak un-
naturally rapidly or slowly, or not speak at all. A perplexed look,
which they would quickly try to hide, might come on their faces.
It was a strange and interesting thing.
In all of this, he tried to make allowances for his own subjective
misperceptions and misinterpretations. Nor did he take it all to be
a matter of the individual in relation to the mass. Much of it was
doubtless no more than specific reactions and interactions between
the particular person Nathan Antrum and the particular place York
Beach. He was cautious of superimposing ideas on the experience.
He was cautious of generalizing. However, here it was, a field of
human phenomena, himself in it; and he was trying to observe and
understand it.
For Antrum, York Beach came to exist as an entity, as much an
entity, in its scale, as Bruce or Alma in theirs. His responses to it
were as definite as his responses to them.
One evening at The Shawl he took from his pocket and read to
Bruce a note he had written that day:
The sluggish currents in the human world are always flowing;
and the people who compose this stream are always in it, in con-
tact with whatever vivifying elements it may contain. This is the
collective or mass world. It is fed by physical and sex energies whose
main business is to procure and eat food, secure and keep a mate,
and reproduce; by pain (not psychological suffering); by wishes
which occur in set patterns and which seek nearby objects; by in-
grained likes and dislikes; and by groups or clusters of fixed ideas.
This is the world of the body. Its mechanics are those of the body,
namely, reflex actions, mechanical reactions. It has no continuity,
just as physical matter in general lacks continuity. The particles,
its constituents, are apparently proximate. They are held together
in mass by the force we call life. Life itself is conscious, but, by a
strange paradox, these constituents of life are unconscious. This
world moves, but it does not progress, though the idea of progress,
the belief in progress, is now one of its fixed ideas. It has no for-
ward motion. It revolves about a fixed point. The people who com-
pose it always live; they never die, and hence they never know
what life is.
The vivid currents in the human world are not currents; they
are flashes, now on, now off, intermittent; and the people who
make them, live while they flash on, and suffer temporary death
when they flash off. This is the world of individuals, of individuals
in the making. It too is fed by physical and sex energies; by pain.
It has these factors in common with the mass world. It has a body.
But it is not primarily a world of the body. It is a world beginning
to be born above the body. It is the world of form. It experiences
psychological suffering. Frequently it experiences more suffering
than pain. The patterns of its wishes are more plastic. The wishes
themselves are far more energized and tend to seek far off and
even impossible objectives. Hence this world progresses. In con-
tradistinction to the collective world which desires pleasure, com-
fort, gratification, the world of individuals seeks happiness, bliss,
perfection. The ideas of the individual world are plastic; they are
made active by the functions of thinking and understanding. This
is the world of the psyche. Its mechanics are those of the psyche,
tending to be active, self-active, rather than reactive. It has a con-
tinuity similar to that of the ether. The particles, its constituents,
are apparently non-proximate. They are held together by affinity.
They are conscious. They are the brain cells of conscious life. This
world moves and has forward motion. The people who compose it
die often, and hence they know what life is.
Antrum, having finished, looked up from his paper and asked:
"Well, Bruce?"
"It is good," said Bruce at once. "I question several statements.
But perhaps it is a matter of phrasing. It doesn't matter. I think it
is very good. I respond more to the sense of solidity and structure
it gives than to the ideas. I don't mean that the ideas are unimpor-
tant. I mean I was particularly impressed by its form and rhythm.
Perhaps this was because you read it, the way you read it. It was as
if I were getting a whole man, not merely the ideas of a man. When
did you write it?"
And Nathan began telling of the concrete experiences in York
Beach which had served as material and as stimuli for his formu-
lation.
CHAPTER V
The friendship of Nathan and Bruce had grown and deepened
rapidly. Within a week, owing to conditions at York, conditions
which suspended or changed the habits of their urban existence
and which brought them together as the only two people of their
kind at York, they had established an intimacy and set up a kind
of essential interchange more free and clear than they had before
experienced.
They had become sensitively familiar with and understanding of
each other's characteristics; so that their gestures, facial expressions,
postures and movements of body, things that formerly, though
noticed, were often without clear meaning, now came to have im-
mediate significance. And, as their intuition of each other advanced,
each began seeing in the other his basic attitudes and responses.
Bruce, however, and strangely enough, had no clear sight as to
the actual forms and progressions of Nathan's deepest inward expe-
riences. For, open though he was, Nathan never or rarely mentioned
these. He had a strange way of seeming to tell everything, and in
truth, telling a great deal; and yet, somehow, never revealing his
inner self. This self, and its experiences were usually, in a rather
baffling way, kept out of the picture. So that, after intimate contact
with him, Bruce often felt that save for what he guessed and in-
ferred, he had never seen Nathan, the fundamental Nathan. Antrum
was intimate, and yet aloof; revealing of himself, and yet strangely
completely concealed.
He was not naturally inclined to make confessions. He did not
deliberately hold back. He was not consciously on guard lest he
reveal himself. He was not intentionally secretive, reserved, aloof.
He was just so, by nature. He could, if he thought necessary, make
uncompromising confessions. But it was not often he felt the need
of this. And, on the other hand, if he set himself against it, the
most agonizing experience could not wring a confession from him.
For the most part, he simply never mentioned his deepest experi-
ences. And hence it sometimes seemed that his interior being lived
in a world dimensionally removed from the activities of his per-
sonality. His projections, when they did come, came from a stark
realness.
And so, all in all, Bruce was in doubt, but fascinated, amused,
disturbed, interested, and recurrently reconciled to Nathan's be-
havior. It was an event when Nathan entered the door for dinner.
Bruce never knew what kind of temper to expect. He was assured
of a basic friendliness; but, within this form, anything might
happen.
Half an hour before dinner Bruce usually left his room and went
down stairs. And there, seated near a table lamp, he would read a
book and wait for Nathan to come in. As seven o'clock drew near,
he would frequently glance towards the door. The minute Nathan
arrived, he would quickly lay his book aside and look searchingly
at him.
Sometimes Nathan would come in in high spirits, his face ani-
mated, his movements quick and vigorous. He might have the air of
a genial aristocrat. He might be up to deviltry. He might be dra-
matic, or dominant. He would stimulate activity and tend to make
all things take the rate of his vibrations. At other times, his face
would be long and drawn, his tall body drooping. He would take
a chair and sit in it glum, or looking as if waiting for a chance to
satirize something. In such states he could be like a solid weight,
unmovable, untouchable. Then he would make Bruce uncomfor-
table. He would say nothing, but just gaze out, his dark eyes burn-
ing. He could sit that way without moving, without speaking, for a
solid hour. If spoken to, his responses usually were short, and might
have sting to them. He looked like a prince in exile, or like a sar-
donic philosopher whose system of the universe had been upset or
rejected owing to some trifling new discovery.
And then-this was the Nathan that Bruce most deeply responded
to-he would be calm, deeply calm, clear, immediate, lyric, tender,
exquisitely sensitive, radiating profound well-being, affirming by
his very presence that life is rich and sweet with full meaning. His
ideas seemed to come from an innate saneness, a luminous native
understanding. Indeed he had a purity which seemed never to have
been touched by human experiences. The purity, the simplicity of
a new being. Just to see him was to feel faith and hope.
It distressed Bruce that Nathan appeared to undervalue this aspect
of himself, to overvalue other aspects, as, for instance, the satiric.
He intended to have a serious talk with him on this matter.
One evening after a day of hard work which had made him
intense, integrated, dynamic with brilliant life, clear thoughts, and
vivid feelings, tensioned in himself and within life, Antrum, a
force, entered the dining room. The meal proceeded under a rapid
fire repartee between him and Bruce. Then, happening to glance
towards the hall, Nathan saw Alma passing. At once he called her.
"Alma!" he called, sharply, but with a gay undertone. “Alma,
come here. Come join us."
She turned quickly and looked in their room.
"Come, come," said Nathan.
"I would like to," she said, smiling, and catching his spirit,
"but-
"But what?"
"I've promised Mrs. Galt"
"I don't know what you've promised Mrs. Galt. I know I want
you here. Where is she?”
"Here I am!" he heard Mrs. Galt's voice. Then he saw her look
in the door.
"You also," said Nathan. "Come in. We want both of you."
"We were just going" Mrs. Galt began.
"I don't know where you were going," said Nathan. “The devil
take your going. Come in. Here, you see, I will arrange special
chairs for you." He sprang up and deftly swung two wicker arm
chairs in position so that the two women would be comfortably
ensconsed in front of him and Bruce. Bruce was looking on with
uneasy amazement.
“There!” said Nathan. "May I escort you?"
He did escort them. He seated them with some ceremony, and
then seated himself. He was in a strange state, amusing and yet
serious, easy and yet intense, coaxing and yet commanding. It was
evident he was going to have his way.
Mrs. Galt smiled and looked at Alma. Alma smiled and looked
at Mrs. Galt. Both looked greatly pleased, but puzzled. They
turned to Bruce. But Bruce could give them no explanation. He
himself was wondering what would come next.
Alma soon said: "Well, here we are. Now what are you going
to do with us?"
"Tell you something," said Nathan.
"Tell us something?" both women asked, smiling, wide-eyed,
incredulous that he could say anything to match his state.
"Paint a picture that will transport you into another world. We
will, if you like, leave Long Beach and find ourselves in a world
just suited to my temper. I do hope your tempers are similar to
mine. But if they are not, no matter. They soon will be. Tonight,
ladies, and my dear Bruce," and he bowed to them, "I wish to be
in a world of brilliant royalty, grand dukes, courtiers, princes, prin-
cesses, clever men and alluring women. I wish to be in a great ball-
room where intrigues for high stakes are crackling even while we
dance and flirt. A brilliant world of a great Empire!"
"I don't like grand dukes," Mrs. Galt objected.
"What!" Nathan pounced on her, "you don't like grand dukes?"
"I come from the middle-west, you see," she said, laughing.
“No, I don't see. Cinderella still lives today. So listen attentively,
Mrs. Galt. I am about to give you a picture which the dream of the
world responds to."
"Where is your Empire?" she asked, practically.
"Where?" said Nathan. "I don't know. How should I know? I
now conjure it. I now build it. I build it as men have built such
things. But if you object to imagination, and even to fancy, then
let us come to earth and say that it is the Russian Empire at the
time of its most extraordinary Tsar. I select Russia because the
Russians knew how to mingle love and diplomacy. They knew
how to be aristocrats."
"Terrible aristocrats," said Mrs. Galt with feeling.
"Yes, terrible," said Nathan, with more feeling than Mrs. Galt,
a swift, deep, dynamic feeling. And then, with a quick change to
a light, semi-cutting tone, he continued: "But my dear Mrs. Galt,
how do you expect me to get on with my picture if you sit back
on the prairies and just won't come along?"
Bruce and Alma, even Mrs. Galt, had to laugh.
Then Nathan addressed Alma: "You, Alma, you wish to come
along? You would like a great hall, brilliant men and sparkling
women? Men with power to play the game? Women with suffi-
cient power over men? Where nations meet and are held in palms?
Where fortunes revolve and the world sings with the triumphs and
defeats of great destinies?"
"I would! I would!" Alma exclaimed, "I want to come along!"
"Ah, Bruce," Nathan addressed him with great relish, “you see?
We may still have Empire in America."
Bruce knew that Nathan was playing, but Nathan's whole state,
his intense strangeness, made him feel uneasy. He was getting
worked up.
"Yes, I see," he replied, batting his eyelids.
Then Mrs. Galt said to Nathan: "I didn't know you were an
aristocrat."
"No?" asked Nathan. "Well, now you know it."
"He is joking, Mrs. Galt," said Bruce, seriously.
"Not at all," said Nathan.
Bruce said to the women: "You should hear him tell of his expe-
riences at York Beach."
"Yes," said Nathan, "I can be a democrat. But I am convinced
that the world cannot. No sizeable group of people for any length
of time. Not so-called civilized people. And I hate democratic pre-
tense. Bah, if men must be ruled by fear and power, give me the
clean cruelty of monarchy, the candid exercise of absolute power.
I hate the sham-you know it: 'I, the ruler, dear people, am here
by your permission and I am doing just what you would have me
do." He paused, and then with deep feeling said: "Yes, in being,
I am equal. In being I know only pure equality with other beings.
But, men being what they are, and I, having my temperament, in
the present scheme of things I am decidedly an aristocrat. But per-
haps not what you mean by an aristocrat." And his eyes flashed to
tell them that he meant what he said.
"Seriously, Nathan," Bruce asked, "do you think monarchy the
highest form of government?"
Mrs. Galt said: "What about England?"
Nathan replied to her first: "English monarchy is nothing. It is
merely a tool of the upper classes to keep their social status intact.
Where would the lords and ladies be if there were no king? But
I am not talking of social status. I am speaking of a functioning
method of actual government."
To Bruce he said: "Yes, to my mind monarchy is the highest form
of government for idiots by idiots.”
Alma recoiled and said quickly to herself: "So that is what he
thinks of us! Well, I will see that he gets no chance to govern this
idiot!"
Bruce asked: "You believe there is a higher form?"
Nathan answered: "Yes, a form for men."
"Plato?" asked Bruce, "Plato's Republic?"
"Higher," said Nathan.
"Pure fancy?" asked Bruce.
"No, pure fact," said Nathan with intensity. "Pure potentiality.
Sufficiently real for me to say that I would give my life to help
form it."
His idealism struck Alma deeper than his pessimism. She wav-
ered, looked at him. Then with a confused but deep swift feeling
she told herself: "He would! He means it!"
Mrs. Galt asked: "Do you think there will ever be an Empire
in America, an American Empire?"
"Perhaps, someday," Nathan replied. "If we, and if our present
tendencies survive the next war. Perhaps someday when the demo-
cratic dogma is less strong in people, and when there comes a man
with the genius and the power and the courage to break tradition,
overrule his rivals, and declare himself. Ah, but I would hail such
a man!"
Alma objected: "But suppose the Empire crushed you. Suppose it
tried to crush you?"
Nathan answered: "Then I'd resist it. But it wouldn't. Not the
first Empire. Not the first Emperor. Because as a general rule the
first Emperors know, and know how to gather about them and
utilize the strongest powers and the best men and talents of their
era. In contrast to later Emperors and to pseudo-leaders who know
nothing, who gather and utilize nothing, but are used by men or
habits stronger than themselves."
"Aren't these dangerous ideas for people to hear?" asked Mrs.
Galt.
"No, Mrs. Galt. People will never hear them. Their ears, as
organs, are open. But their minds are sufficiently closed and sealed.
Yes, a crazy man might hear them. But the government is building
each day bigger and better asylums for crazy men."
Bruce abruptly asked: "Seriously, Nathan, if you had to put it in
one word, what would you say is America's worst feature?"
Nathan answered without hesitation: "Hypocrisy. Everywhere
hypocrisy. From the bottom to the top, north and south, east and
west, everywhere hypocrisy. Business everywhere is a skin-game.
I'll get you if you don't get me first. This is so the world over, not
only in America, but everywhere. Bargaining is at the core of busi-
ness; and trickery is at the core of bargaining. Some people admit
this, and accept it as such. They have, if you can so call it, honest
business. But here in America we pretend it is done in the spirit of
Christ, for the love and uplift of our neighbors, for high living
standards, for progress, prosperity, civilization, and Uncle Sam.
The East-side Jews of New York are the only honest business men
we have.
"We drink more than France and England combined, but we
have prohibition. We care for nothing but money and social posi-
tion, but claim to be an exemplary moral and democratic nation.
We pretend that politics is a clean game, and everyone knows it is
thoroughly rotten. We have more sex affairs than occur in all
Europe, but are puritanical. We don't give a damn what Christ
said, but we have thousands of Christian institutions with their oily
piety. We claim culture, and despise it. We claim liberty, and exist
in economic, political, moral, and mental slavery. Everywhere hypoc-
risy. We are so thoroughly hypocritical that we don't know it. We
sincerely believe we are honest. One of our best critics put us in a
nut-shell when he said: 'If the South can stagger to the polls it will
vote dry.' Just so. Everywhere hypocrisy."
"What is our best feature?" asked Bruce.
Nathan answered: "That America allows a man to make him-
self. To make himself in essence. Here we have the possibility of
becoming normal real men and women. How much we use the
possibility is another matter. You once asked me to define an
American. I didn't then. I will now. An American is one who is
making use of the here existing possibilities of self-development."
Before anyone could comment, Alma arose quickly and said with
an unsteady voice: "Really, I think we must be going."
"Yes, yes, of course you must," Nathan cut at her.
And then, relaxing, and smiling mischievously, he said: "You
must, I hope you will pardon Bruce. I am sure he did not intend
to keep you so long."
"Bruce?" the women gasped, looking strangely from Bruce to
Nathan and back again.
"Yes, Bruce," said Nathan. "Certainly. I am sure he had no
thought of verbing so much. But you will excuse him?"
He paused, then spoke curtly: "Goodnight! Goodnight!"
The women gave a nervous laugh, shook their heads, and quickly
went out.
Originally published in The New American Caravan, 1929
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