Point of No Return (31 page)

Usually after supper he went upstairs alone to his room to read and it surprised Charles that evening when he asked him to come up too.

“That is, if you have time, Charley,” John Gray said, “or have you a round of engagements?”

The room where his father spent his evenings was almost square with two deep windows with window seats and, on either side of the fireplace, arches and two other windows. A battered sofa stood in front of the fireplace and a table behind it held a student lamp and the books and papers in which John Gray was currently interested. Two ugly Morris chairs by the sofa had come from the Marchbys and some older Windsor chairs had been sent over by Aunt Jane from the Judge's house, and the painted pine floor was partly covered with a worn Oriental carpet. The bookcases were filled with brown leather volumes from the Judge's library and others which John Gray had purchased. Among these were, of course, the works of Samuel Johnson and all sorts of other volumes of the period, all with elaborate dedications to their patrons. Tacitus, an early translation of the seventeenth century, stood beside Burton's
Anatomy of Melancholy
, and Boccaccio, with a broken back, leaned against Fuller's
Worthies.
The bookcases were far from adequate. Books stood in heaps on top of them and in piles on the floor near the table, like the broken columns of a ruined temple.

The room was never neat, because John Gray did not like to have the women dust it. He said he knew where every book was until people began to move them. Women never went with books. They did not understand why he did not want his print of London Bridge dusted, or why he liked the Landseer engraving of sad-eyed dogs. It might not be a good picture but he liked it, and he liked to have his shotguns leaning in the corner under one of the arches by the fireplace, and he liked to have his brass-bound box of old decanters on the floor, and the sea chest that had belonged to his grandfather, the Captain, cater-corner on the far side of the room, and he did not care whether the tall clock there kept time or not. He knew to the half minute how much time it lost during the week.

As Charles followed his father up the stairs, he could hear the clock ticking and then it made an asthmatic sound and struck the hour of three though it was half past seven o'clock. He could also hear the wind outside and a sharp spatter on the windows, showing that a northeaster was starting.

“You stand here by the door, Charley,” John Gray said, “until I light the lamp. I don't want you tipping over books.” There was a pungent smell of moldering leather and old wood and stale tobacco smoke as John Gray moved into the dusky room.

“Close the door, Charley,” he said. “It's always better in here with the door closed.” He had lighted the student lamp and had replaced the chimney and now he was turning up the wick and putting back the green glass shade. “Sit down in that Morris chair. That's right. Did I ever tell you that's the chair your Grandfather Marchby died in?”

“No,” Charles said, “I don't think you ever did.”

John Gray smiled and walked over to the fireplace and stood looking down at him.

“Well, don't look worried, Charley,” he said. “He couldn't help it. There are a great many things we can't help, Charley, or do you think we can?”

“I don't suppose we can help dying, it that's what you mean,” Charles said, and he was uneasy as always when he was alone with his father.

“You're at an age, I suppose, when you feel you can help anything by power of will,” John Gray said. “How would you like a glass of port?”

“Why, thanks,” Charles said, “if you want one.”

“Open the decanter box, Charley, and hand me the right-hand bottle, filled with a purplish-red liquid, and take out two glasses. It's Jewish sacramental wine.” His father was drawing a small tavern table in front of the sofa. “That's it. Moe Levine told me where to get it.”

His father took the stopper from the decanter and filled two antique wineglasses. Nothing in his manner indicated that the occasion was in the least unusual, but Charles could not help wondering what he wanted. It was not a part of family custom to be sitting in his father's room. If his father wanted to talk he always came downstairs to the parlor.

“I suppose you've done a little drinking at Dartmouth,” his father said. “But I'd have known it if liquor had ever passed your lips around here, Charley, above one fluid ounce,” and he laughed and sat down on the sofa. “There would have been whisperings on the Rialto.” His father raised his glass. “Try it, Charley, it won't hurt you.”

The sacramental wine was heavy and unpleasantly sweet and its taste added to Charles's uneasiness. He felt, as he often did, that his father was laughing at him, and he was never sure whether the laughter was entirely friendly.

His father had half turned his head toward the window. “Listen to the rain,” he said. “‘Neither coat nor cloak will hold out against rain upon rain.' Do you know who said that, Charley?”

“No, sir, I'm afraid I don't,” Charles answered.

“Oh, dear,” his father said. “Thomas Fuller said it in his
Gnomologia,
and I don't suppose you know what gnomologia is, either.” He leaned forward and refilled his glass. “This is horrible wine. I wish you cared more about the polite adornments of the mind, Charley. ‘Rain upon rain.' I've been through a lot of rains. Keep out of the rain, Charley.” He smiled at Charles and seemed to expect him to make some reply, but when Charles talked with his father nothing ever seemed to be on a firm foundation.

“What does gnomologia mean?” Charles asked.

“Oh, dear,” his father said, “didn't they tell you at Dartmouth?”

“I don't see why you keep picking on Dartmouth,” Charles said. “It's a pretty good school.”

His father raised his heavy, dark eyebrows. “I can't say it hasn't developed your mind,” he said. “It seems to me that you have a retentive mind, neither receptive nor curiosity seeking, but retentive. Roughly gnomologia means a collection of sayings or proverbs. The word is obsolete.”

“Then I don't suppose it will do any good to know it,” Charles answered.

“That's an interesting way to put it,” John Gray said slowly. “I suppose you mean that all knowledge should be useful, because someone has told you that knowledge is power.”

“Well, I don't see any use in learning a lot of things that don't do you any good.” He stopped and he felt annoyed at himself and his father. It did not help when John Gray laughed.

“Why, of course,” he said. “Naturally, Charley. I'm not criticizing you for a single minute. You're only saying that you want to get on or get ahead. It's a very common objective around here.”

John Gray leaned more comfortably back against the corner of the sofa. Perhaps it was the room or the rain on the windows or the sacramental wine or his uneasy annoyance that made Charles say what he said next.

“Didn't you ever want to get on?” he asked. The question was too personal and his father was no longer comfortable.

“Why, yes, Charley,” he said. “Yes, I've wanted to get on, but I suppose you think it was a silly way, the way I tried, and I don't blame you. You'd be following a convention.”

“Well, I don't know much about it,” Charles said.

“Do you remember what Jonathan Swift said?” his father continued. “‘Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices: so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.'” Suddenly John Gray laughed and stood up. “I've never liked creeping. I suppose I could have crept and if I had I might be on the Clyde Fund.”

He said it without much emphasis and for the first time Charles felt sorry about it. He wanted to say something, to tell him it did not matter, but he could think of no way in which to say it which did not sound stupid or gauche. He picked up his glass nervously between his fingers.

“Well, we weren't talking about that anyway,” he said.

His father stood with his head tilted to one side, listening to the hissing rhythm of the rain against the window. The wind had risen in sharp gusts so that the rain splashed against the panes in wavelike surges, as though someone from outside were throwing it with a dipper. Something was making John Gray restless and he took a short turn around the room before he spoke again, moving as though he did not need to see any of the objects in it.

“I'm hardly in a position to give you any sound advice, Charley,” he said suddenly. “‘Advice, as it always gives a temporary appearance of superiority, can never be very grateful.'” From the sonorous tone of his voice, Charles knew that he was quoting again. He wished his father would not keep leaning on other people's thoughts. He was wondering whose words had been resurrected now, probably Samuel Johnson's. Yes, it was Samuel Johnson.

“And yet,” John Gray was saying, “Johnson himself spent most of his time giving unsolicited advice.” He paused and stared at the floor. “Now this subject of your getting on interests me. Of course, I know why you want to. You want to because I obviously haven't.”

It was much better, Charles was thinking, not to answer. Instead of answering he found himself pouring another glass of that sticky wine.

“But I would like you to know, Charley,” and he noticed that his father was speaking with an artificial, constrained sort of lightness, “that I've made what I consider several intelligent and rather vigorous efforts to get on, considering the handicaps, and without creeping, always without creeping—but I couldn't beat the system. The system is not fluid, and it's very hard to beat.”

“What system?” Charles asked.

“Why, the system under which we live,” John Gray said. “The order. There's always some sort of order.”

He was speaking more rapidly and confidently and suddenly Charles understood that he was cutting the cloth to fit his faults, as everyone did at some time or other.

“There's always the bundle of hay out ahead, for any ass who wants to get on,” John Gray was saying, “and They make it look like a very pleasant bundle.”

“Who are ‘They'?” Charles asked.

“That's an intelligent question,” John Gray answered. “They are the people who own the hay. They are the people who run the system, and They have to toss out a little hay now and then to make the system work; and the curious thing about it is that They don't realize in the least that They are running the system. They are only acting through a series of rather blind instincts and that's about all there is to anything, Charley, instinct. They'll tell you there's plenty of hay for anyone who can get it, but the main thing, Charley, is that They don't really want you to get it. It might be some of Their hay.”

Charles could follow his father's metaphor and he could tell from the bright look on John Gray's face that he was delighted with it himself. Voltaire had the same brilliant bitterness, the same cynicism, and a similar painful undercurrent of truth—and John Gray was still speaking.

“You can get so far by effort, Charley. You will find you can obtain a little hay but if you reach for more you'll get a sharp rap on the muzzle. I'm being very wise this evening, Charley, and I know I'm right because I've tried to get some of that hay. Don't worry. It's all over now. I won't try again. All I want now is to keep out of the rain and to manufacture a suitable waterproof. I'm tired of the system, Charley. I'm delighted to give up.”

John Gray sighed and sat down again on the sofa. What he had said was the apologia of John Gray, an alibi, a distorted story of the talents and of labor in the vineyard and now he was finishing his apologia.

“If I were you,” he was saying, “I wouldn't try too hard for the hay. You might be disappointed, Charley.”

It sounded like
Candide
and Charles was thinking that if everyone followed John Gray's philosophy nothing would happen anywhere and yet he could think of no reasonable ground for argument.

“Well,” he said, “if you call it hay it seems to me that you've had a lot more hay than most people and more than I'll ever have.”

That was where it ended. He did not think that he was speaking out of resentment until he saw the light leave his father's face.

“That's a detail, Charley,” John Gray said, “and it doesn't alter the general picture.”

“Maybe it doesn't for you,” Charles said, “but it does for all the rest of us.”

John Gray was silent for a moment. The talk was gone and the quotations with it. He picked up his empty glass and stared at it and put it back on the table.

“Don't be so hard on me, Charley,” he said. “I told you I wasn't going to do it again. It's like liquor, I can take it or leave it alone, and besides”—he looked apologetic but at the same time he looked as though a cheerful thought had struck him—“it was a wretchedly small amount of hay.”

6

The Readers of the
Boston Evening Transcript
Sway in the Wind Like a Field of Ripe Corn

—
T
.
S
.
ELIOT

Somehow, after their talk that evening, Charles and his father had arrived at a basis for friendship which prevented either of them from offending the other, though it was a little like the friendship between two lawyers who had argued in court and dined together afterwards. There was always something in their association that was like the mercury from a broken thermometer dividing and rolling about with the bits never really coming together. It was diverting when his father spoke about hay to remind him that there was still a little hay, in the shape of the mill stock left in trust under Uncle Gerald and Mr. Blashfield. They would not be able to live on Spruce Street if it were not for that hay.

“But it's getting moldy,” John Gray said. “Mill stocks aren't what they used to be.”