Earth and High Heaven (19 page)

He said, “That's not the point though. I can't describe what I mean by a mass consciousness, exactly. A few people up top seem to know what it's all about, like Vice-President Wallace and Sumner Welles and their opposite numbers in England. They have to put into words what the masses just sort of feel. But it's all vague, and the worst of it is that the people with most of the power have everything tied up in the status quo, so we're back where we started again, with the big interests fighting for one kind of world and the masses fighting for something else.”

Miriam had been staring at him with growing amazement. Now she asked, “How long has this been going on, for goodness' sake?”

“How long has what been going on?”

Failing to think of any way of saying it which wouldn't sound rude, she answered finally with a hopeless gesture, “You've come such a long way from the bond house!”

“Thanks,” said John. “When you've been in the Army for three years, you're bound to start wondering why you're there, some time or other.”

“And do you know now?” inquired Miriam.

“Yes, or at least I'm beginning to get a general idea. I joined up more or less at the start in ‘39 because my sort always does,” he said matter-of-factly, as though he were discussing someone else. “Not because I was particularly anxious to pull up stakes and go out and die for my country, but just because I come from a certain type of background — a good school, university, do your job and don't leave it to the other fellow — that sort of thing. Fine in 1900, but not enough to get you through this kind of war. I don't like England much, it gives me claustrophobia, and I was stuck in a holding unit down on the south coast, homesick as the devil for a country big enough so that if you went walking at night you wouldn't be running the risk of falling off the edge, and half the time I had nothing to do but play chess with the local vicar and think.”

“So you thought,” said Miriam.

“Shut up,” he said good-humoredly, but he was embarrassed. He ran one hand over his fair hair, glanced at Miriam with that expression at the back of his blue eyes which gave him away every time he looked at her, and asked, “What shall we do now? Has anybody got any good ideas?”

“I want to go somewhere and dance,” said Miriam.

On the way to the door she asked John how he liked Marc. “First rate,” said John. “Your father must be crazy.”

“Oh, no,” said Miriam. “He just thinks we're fighting the other kind of war — you know, the one for the status quo.”

Later, as she was dancing with Marc, Miriam asked suddenly, “Don't you think it would be a good idea if Eric got a place of her own to live?”

“Why?”

He was watching a couple who were dancing on the floor somewhere behind her and she said, “Eric thinks Charles is going to change his mind, but he isn't. Not ...” She stopped herself just in time, having been on the point of adding without thinking, “Not until it's too late,” and said instead, “Not until he's just about worn her ragged.”

“She doesn't eat enough,” said Marc noncommittally.

“Well, no,” said Miriam, rather at a loss. Marc was too close for her to see him properly and find out whether he minded her going on or not. She decided to take a chance on his not minding and said, “He never leaves her alone, that's the trouble. He doesn't say anything about you directly, of course, but he does manage to get in a devil of a lot indirectly, and when he's not doing that, he and Mother just sit and look blue, as though Erica's the only thing they ever think about.”

He surprised her by saying in the same expressionless tone, “Maybe she is.” Still looking over Miriam's shoulder, he added, “I didn't know they still objected to me so much. I thought they were probably getting used to it by now.”

She did not know how he could possibly have thought that when Erica must have told him that her parents were not making the slightest effort to get used to it — on the contrary!

The music stopped, then started again, and she said, “Tell me, Mr. Reiser, do you do everything as well as you dance?”

“Practically everything,” said Marc, grinning. “By the way, I like your friend Major Gardiner.”

“He likes you too.” Like Erica, she found it difficult to imagine anyone with a grain of sense not liking Marc. It was not only that he was attractive and intelligent, with charm and good manners and a marvellous smile, but he had another quality, still more important. He was completely straight. After talking to him for even a short time, you knew that he would never lie nor take an advantage, and after a little longer, you also knew that he was incapable of consciously going out of his way to make an impression no matter who it was, and that he would be the same person in court or at a social affair as he was with Erica, John, his own family, or his Chinese laundryman.

“You have a Chinese laundryman, haven't you?” asked Miriam.

“I think he has me. He always comes when I'm out and takes whatever he thinks needs washing. It doesn't make any difference whether I think so or not, unless I take the trouble to hide it somewhere so he won't find it.” He sighed and said reminiscently, “My secretary used to be like that too. She even had my lunch sent up to the office whenever she could, so that she could make certain I had a properly balanced meal.”

He went on talking about his secretary, whose name was Miss Carruthers, who was wonderful, and who had promised to come back as soon as he got out of the Army and started practicing law again.

Miriam was only half listening, she was far more interested in Marc himself than in his former secretary.

Without realizing it, she had assumed that the chief problem in Erica's apparently hopeless situation was her father ... as though Marc were more or less in the position of someone hanging around the door waiting to be let in. Now that she had met him and he had turned out to be so subtly different from what she had expected, that bland assumption, which she supposed was shared by her father, already struck her as fantastic.

“There's no sense your starting to worry about it,” said Marc suddenly.

She had been following him automatically with her left hand twisting the upper of the two pips on his shoulder. She moved her hand nearer his collar and said, “I can't help worrying. I care more about Eric than I do about anyone else. If she weren't so damned decent, none of this would have happened to her. Mother used to be fond of saying that Erica had never given either her or Charles a moment's worry — well, you'd think that since she's never done anything they didn't want her to do until now, they'd take her seriously and show some respect for her. But it doesn't work that way at all — they're so used to Erica never doing anything they don't want that they're damn well not going to allow her to start at the age of twenty-eight.”

“That's a rather brutal way of putting it, isn't it?”

“Isn't that really what Charles means when he says this is the first time Erica has ever let them down, and that he's not going to let her ruin her life if he can help it? Whose life is it, for God's sake? Charles' or Erica's?”

He said nothing. He only smiled at her and looked away again.

She remarked a moment later, “It's amazing the way people can assume that they know what's ‘best' for someone else — that they know better than the individual concerned what is going to make him or her happy or unhappy. Really, when you come to think of it, it is the most stupefying arrogance. I'm not talking about children, of course, but grown-up people who are obviously old enough to make up their own minds.”

The music stopped again and in the pause he said, watching the band leader who was talking to one of the saxophone players, gesturing as though he were angry about something, “It's not always as simple as that. Their assumptions may simply be based on what they know happened to everybody who tried breaking the rules because they thought they were exceptions too.”

“But surely there are exceptions, aren't there?”

He said wearily, “For every individual who really is exceptional there are about fifty thousand who just imagine they are — until it's too late, and they find out they aren't after all.”

She was too disturbed to notice that the other couples had left the floor and after looking at him blankly for a moment she said, “Let's go to the bar. I feel like a drink and we can't talk very well at the table with John and Eric.”

The bar was all blue and silver, dimly lit by pinpricks of light scattered over the low, dark blue ceiling. There were a few people sitting here and there, talking in low voices against the sound of the orchestra from the next room. Miriam and Marc sat down at a table in the corner beside a large, stylized plant which appeared to be made of some kind of metal.

It was another place where she had often been with Max, even oftener than at the little restaurant in which the four of them had had dinner. For some reason or other he had taken a liking to the blue atmosphere and the deep, comfortable leather-covered chairs, and there was an interval just after they sat down and before she or Marc said anything, when the past obliterated the present, like one picture dissolving into another on a screen. The room blurred, then slowly came into focus again, only it was very slightly changed, with the chairs and tables not where they were now but a few inches to the left or right, where they had been last time, Tuesday night of the week before. Miriam had reason to remember that it was Tuesday in particular.

Max was sitting beside her in a dark suit, his legs straight out under the table and his head against the back of the low chair, running his fingers lightly over the inside of his wrist. His profile was outlined against the light drifting through the door down the wall. She had been talking about herself and Peter and the deep-rooted conviction of her own inadequacy with which she had had to go on living after her divorce. She was wondering why it was so easy to talk to Max when it had been so difficult to talk to anyone else, and she had turned her head toward that profile, on the point of asking him, when she saw that for the first time since they had known each other, she was boring him. She had told him too much.

She had forgotten that there are people who are born superficial, whose superficiality is usually related to ideas, to their attitude toward politics, economics, art, literature, and the objective world, but also occasionally to their attitude toward other people. They prefer not to have to deal with more than a limited number of oversimplified ideas — they prefer the book reviews to the books, the headlines and the leading paragraph to the full report, the generalization to the facts, and the negative to the positive. For these people, more than a little knowledge is a burden; they don't know what to do with it. They put down a book or a newspaper, turn off the radio, change the subject or break off a love affair, simply for fear of knowing too much and getting in too deep.

That was what had happened with Max. He had found himself getting in too deep. The basis of their relationship had been almost entirely physical and in her mistaken effort to broaden that basis, she had overlooked the fact that Max simply did not want it broadened. It suited him far better as it was. In telling him a lot of things about herself which, she realized now that it was too late, he did not in the least desire to know, she had given herself away for the first time in her life, and to the wrong person. Not knowing what to do with her, he had taken a week to think it over and had then, in effect, handed her back to Miriam Drake again.

She became aware of Marc's greenish eyes watching her with an expression which was oddly incurious and understanding. She had no idea how long they had been sitting here, it probably wasn't more than a few minutes but even so, if Marc had been John, he would have been all over her with bewilderment and sympathy by this time. She found herself thinking that she might still marry John sometime in the future, if she could get over her fear of his inexperience and if, in the meantime, someone would just tell her how you can manage to get through life with a man who has to have all but the most elementary emotions explained to him in words of one syllable.

“There's your drink, Miriam,” said Marc at last. “Would you rather go back?”

“No, I'm all right.” She raised her glass, then put it down again, remarking, “I thought I was one of the exceptions, that's all — one of your fifty thousand who think they're smart enough to figure out what's going to happen in advance so that it won't hurt so much when the time comes. You know, a realist. Are you a realist?”

“I'm a superrealist,” said Marc, grinning. “I know that no matter how bad I think something's going to be, it will undoubtedly turn out to be a lot worse.”

“Optimistic, aren't you? Why don't you marry Eric before you go?” she asked abruptly.

“And leave her to cope with the whole thing alone?”

She knew that she had had no right to ask such a question and was surprised at his giving her even that much of an answer. He had been definitely uncommunicative up till now.

A moment later he surprised her still more. He said, “Anyhow, I may not come back, and I've complicated Erica's life enough already without going on doing it after I'm dead. Some day she might want to marry someone else and I'd rather it was the first time for her, not the second. If I were going to be here another six months it might be different.”

After a pause he went on, looking down at his glass, “And apart from everything else, we've got to win the war first. I know that's what a lot of people say but in our case it happens to be true. So long as there's even one chance in ten that we don't win, I couldn't afford to take it, because naturally I couldn't involve her in what would happen if we lost.”

“Wouldn't she be involved anyhow?”

“Not quite to the same extent,” said Marc rather dryly. “I don't know whether I have any right to involve her if we win the war and then lose the peace.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean if we get rid of the Nazis only to end up with the status quo ante. You know, a lot of the mud that Hitler slung at us from ‘33 to ‘39 is still sticking. Even when he didn't succeed in stirring up active anti-Semitism, he managed to make almost everybody thoroughly Jew-conscious, even over here and in the States.”

“Do you think things are worse here than they were before 1933?”

“Oh, yes. Much worse.” He paused and said, “Erica doesn't really know what she's walking into. I do.” His face lost some of its expression and he said, “Evidently your father does too.”

“How do you know Eric doesn't?”

“Because she can't.”

“Well,” said Miriam into her glass. “At least Eric's beginning to learn.”

For the second time she was realizing that there was something inside Marc Reiser which you couldn't change, and which, perhaps, he couldn't even change himself. He had been born skeptical, and under ideal conditions, he might simply have gone on with the same degree of passive skepticism or it might even have been gradually reduced and eradicated finally, if not in his children, then in his grandchildren. But the conditions were not ideal; you might almost say that they were specially designed to work on that skepticism, to confirm it and enlarge it and ultimately to transform it into an active influence.

She had grown up in a country where Jews were Jews, and with a few exceptions — musicians, one or two painters, occasionally a university professor, scientist, or doctor — that was all there was to it. You leave us alone and we'll leave you alone. Thus having been brought up to view “The Jews” from a safe distance, she had thought of them as a category rather than as individuals, and therefore, without being aware of it and more or less in spite of herself, all this time she had been waiting for Marc to do something which would relate him directly to the category — in short, to do or say something “Jewish.”

Now, she thought, this is it, this skepticism, this “superrealism” which consists of reminding yourself that no matter how bad you think things are going to be, they usually turn out to be worse; this basic sense of insecurity, this profound discouragement which was all the more baffling because it was so matter of fact.

She said at last, “You can't tell whether or not it would be worth it to Erica. Nobody can. Nobody can tell which things matter and which don't, or how much they matter one way or the other — to anyone but himself. You can't tell what price anyone else can afford to pay for what they want most, because their price is their whole system of values, and their system of values is the result of everything which has ever happened to them — the way they have come to think and feel and the sum total of all their experience. You'd have to know all that about Eric, and you don't. You can't.” She broke off for a moment, staring at him, and then said half to herself, “That's what I simply can't forgive Charles for. He presumes to know everything about Eric, far better, of course, than she knows herself.”