Crossing to Safety

  “Of course you’re not a nuisance,” she says. “Of course I want you to stay. Mother wants you to stay. I’m glad you came, I truly am. I hoped you would. But marry you! How could we get married when you’re still two or three years from your degree? Everybody’s starving in breadlines, and there we’d be without a job or prospects, and years from getting any. Your mother might support you as long as you’re in school, but she won’t if you’re crazy enough to get married.”

  “There are ways.”

  “What would you do, rob banks?”

  “If that’s what it took. The question is not how we’d manage, it’s do you want to.”

  She looks at him with clear eyes from under the brim of the sou’wester. He grabs for her hand and she pulls it away. Gritting his teeth, he sits looking off down the hill. Distant, half smiling, she says nothing, but when she changes her position, bracing herself and leaning backward, he discovers that one of her hands is again within reach. This time he covers it with his own and will not let it go. Leaning close, he all but roars in frustration and desire, “Charity . . . !”

  With her other hand she sweeps the long wet grass and sprinkles him with cold drops. “Dampen that ardor.”

  “You bloody witch. Tell me one thing.”

  “Of course.”

  “If you wanted me to follow you up here, why didn’t you invite me?”

  “I couldn’t be sure it would match Mother’s plans.”

  “You could have telephoned and found out.”

  “No, I couldn’t. We don’t have a telephone up here.”

  “You could have written.”

  “The mail takes days.”

  “So you just left without a word to me.”

  Her laughter bursts out. “You found me.”

  Pulling at her hand he tips her toward him. “Charity . . . !”

  But she looks at the watch on her wrist, exposed by his pulling, and yanks her hand free and jumps to her feet. “Good Lord, dinner’s in twenty-five minutes. We can’t be late, not your first day. That’d be fatal.”

  “Fatal to what?”

  But she is already running. He sweeps up the slicker and comes after her like a big yellow bat, swooping down the wet hill between the broken stone walls and the old maples. They run all the way home. One minute before the hired girl Dorothy brings on the soup tureen, thirty seconds before George Barnwell Ellis drops his head to say grace, they pant up to the table and scramble into the two empty chairs. Charity has thrown a sweater over her shoulders to dignify her dress for dinner, he has comb marks in his wet hair.

  Aunt Emily gives them a sharp, searching look. Comfort, at nineteen a younger, softer, prettier, less striking version of Charity, has already dropped her chin for the prayer, but lets her eyes wander to Sid, on her left, and then to Charity, across the table. George Barnwell, seeing all chairs filled, does not pause for introductions. He folds his hands and looks benevolently at his plate. “Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for all Thy loving care. Bless us this day, and sanctify this food to our use. Amen.”

  Amen.

  I can’t imagine Sid Lang venturing into the Ellis household without preparing himself. He probably looked up George Barnwell in Who’s Who, the Directory of American Scholars, and the card catalogue of Widener. He might have thumbed through the vast volume on the Albigenses, the seventh person in history to do so. He might even have checked the book out and brought it along in his green bag along with Middlemarch and The Idiot. For he felt the obligation to read everything, and both his passion for Charity and his respect for learning would have made him look upon George Barnwell Ellis as a gold thread in the tapestry of human thought.

  Alone with Professor Ellis he would quickly have established a relationship, as he did with all professors whom he respected. He would have primed the pump, asked questions, listened with attention. But the other presences at the table were distracting, and since introductions had been suspended in favor of grace, and George Barnwell clearly didn’t have the slightest idea who the young man at his table was, Sid found himself exposed to Aunt Emily. She would not have held still for intellectual conversation anyway. She had lived too long with her husband to let him wander into shop talk. “Hush, G.B.,” she had been known to say in company. “Nobody wants to hear about your Bogomils.” Now, while Sid ate like a threshing hand (she did not know he had missed lunch), she set her eyes on him as she might have set a carving fork in a roast. That he ate so heartily prejudiced her in his favor. It had always exasperated her that George Barnwell ate so pickingly.

  “You come from Pittsburgh, Charity tells me.”

  “Sewickley. It’s a suburb.”

  “That must be pleasanter. From all one hears, Pittsburgh is a rather dirty industrial city.”

  “It’s smoky, yes. We’re across the river, on the bluffs.”

  “Has your family lived there long?”

  “My grandfather came there from Scotland.”

  “Like Andrew Carnegie.”

  Laughter. “Well, not quite like Andrew Carnegie.”

  “What does your father do?”

  A little glinting look through shining glasses. “My father’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry. What did he do?”

  “He was in business. Various businesses.”

  From his slight hesitation she judged that he was evading her question. Ashamed of his father? Lost everything in the crash, perhaps? Jumped out a window? The boy was practically in rags. Could he be really poor, the son of a steel worker or something like that? A thoroughgoing egalitarian, Aunt Emily would not have minded. But his laconics made her more curious.

  “Where did you go to school before Harvard?”

  He had a pleasant, musical voice. “Yale,” he said. “Before that, Deerfield.”

  That accounted for his good manners. Pittsburgh could hardly have taught them to him. So respectable an educational background, moreover, argued parents who knew what was best for their son, and were able to afford it.

  “Is your mother living? Do you have brothers and sisters?”

  “My mother still lives in Sewickley. One of my sisters lives in Akron, the other in Chicago.”

  It sounded rather drearily midwestern. Possibly the boy was trying to outgrow his origins, perhaps with the disadvantage of a family financial collapse. If he was making his own way through graduate school, as so many had to do these days, he was to be respected.

  George Barnwell had become aware that the young man he was entertaining was a Harvard student, and asked courteously after his studies. When he learned that Sid had taken courses with both Irving Babbitt and John Livingston Lowes, he chuckled out a story about a colleague who, seeing those two crossing the Yard together, remarked, “There go a scholar and a gentleman.”

  Sid Lang astonished Aunt Emily by leaning back in his chair and guffawing like a tavern drunk. His neck was as wide as his head. He was an odd one, so soft-voiced and polite, and so violently amusable. George Barnwell, surprised at the success of his joke, beamed. Charity looked opaque—annoyed with her father for retailing stale Cambridge witticisms, or embarrassed by her young man’s outburst? Comfort was watching Sid noncommittally. Aunt Emily saw him become aware of the attention being paid him, and feel his way toward safer ground. He advanced the theory that the surest way to be a gentleman was to be a scholar. And what a place for the studious life Battell Pond was! What quiet and beauty, what time for thinking.

  “Yes,” Comfort said. “Up to now.”

  “Why? What’s the matter with it now? The rain? I think the rain’s wonderful, it puts such a living shine on everything.”

  “Oh, not the rain! Good heavens, if we couldn’t stand a little rain we ought to move to Arizona. No, they’re all set to spoil Battell Pond. You know the shore across the cove?”

  “I don’t think . . . I just got here this afternoon.”

  “It’s all just wild woods. And some criminal bunch, some syndicate, wants to buy it and put in a cabin ca
mp for transients, and a dock, and a gas station, and store—what’s the matter with McChesney’s—and maybe even a movie house and dance hall.”

  Aunt Emily said, “Comfort shouldn’t let it upset her so, but it is too bad.”

  “Too bad?” Comfort said. “It’s horrible. Imagine a lot of tourists, and motorboats, and all-night dances, and broken beer bottles, and all the rest of it. The cove is where all the little kids catch perch. That’s where the bullfrogs congregate. That’s where it’s fun to drift along in a canoe and watch minks and weasels on shore.”

  “It’ll ruin the view from our porch, Mother,” Charity said.

  Sid was attending carefully. “Is it inevitable? Couldn’t you fight it in town meeting?”

  “Town meeting’s not till March,” Comfort said. “They rig it that way so the summer people aren’t here to vote. Anyway, some people around here obviously want a resort. They think it’ll bring on prosperity. They’re all such money-grubbers! So’s Herbert Hill. He doesn’t have to take their dirty money.”

  “He’s a poor farmer,” her mother said. “We can’t expect him to turn down a good offer simply because it will inconvenience us.”

  “Us and everybody else on the lake.”

  “How much money?” Sid asked.

  “I don’t know. Eight thousand, is it? For just those twenty acres of shore. Whole farms, with buildings and stock and machinery, are going for less.”

  “Couldn’t people get together and raise the money? Wouldn’t this Herbert Hill rather sell to his neighbors than to a syndicate?”

  “Perhaps he would, but where do his neighbors find eight thousand dollars these days? Most summer people don’t make half that much in a year. The Battell Pond Association got him to hold off for thirty days, but I haven’t seen the money forthcoming.”

  “I swear if they build that over there I’ll burn it down,” Comfort said.

  “Of course you’ll do nothing of the kind,” her mother said.

  “She might,” Charity said, “and I just might help her.”

  “The minute they build it,” Comfort said.

  Dorothy took away the plates and brought a bowl of strawberries and a pitcher of cream. The table had gone cranky. Again Aunt Emily saw Sid, sensitive as an uneasy hostess, adjust to the changed tone and try to divert the conversation. He turned to Comfort, pushing his glasses up on his nose, and asked her how her name happened to be Comfort. He would have thought that since the first daughter was Charity, the next should have been Faith or Hope.

  He asked it teasingly, and his eyes included Aunt Emily in the question, asking her to take this as a conversational gambit only, as essentially well meaning as the wagging of a dog’s tail.

  Unfortunate. Comfort apparently thought he was condescending to her as the kid sister. She had not been happy to vacate the dorm, which she and her friends used as a clubhouse, and move for an unknown term over to Uncle Dwight’s. She also hated jokes about her name, which she said made her sound like a featherbed. Now she gave Sid a smoky glance and replied that after Charity was born her parents had given up both Faith and Hope.

  “Why, you ungrateful wretch!” Charity cried. “After I joined your arson conspiracy.”

  “Naming you Comfort may have been our highest expression of hope,” Aunt Emily said, and pushed back her chair, ending the conversation and the dinner.

  Dorothy cleared away. George Barnwell rose, shook Sid’s hand and said he hoped they would see more of him, and excused himself to his bedroom and his detective novel. Charity, from across the table, threw Sid a look full of amusement, commiseration, and malice. Comfort disappeared in a cloud of sparks. Aunt Emily, her knitting already in her hand, looked out onto the porch.

  “Why, there’s going to be a sunset. Battell Pond is going to show you its better side after all, Mr. Lang.”

  “Sid,” Sid said. “Please. Being called Mr. Lang makes me nervous.”

  “Come on, Mr. Lang, sir,” Charity said. “You can take me for a canoe ride along Comfort’s enchanted shore. Unless you’d rather read.”

  Aunt Emily later, making a story of it, suggested that Sid had come out of the West like Young Lochinvar and taken them by storm. It wasn’t a bad story, or entirely untrue, but during those first days she didn’t think of him as Lochinvar. She thought of him as a pleasant young man who simply wouldn’t do, and she brooded a good deal about how to tell him and Charity so. Interference, she understood, would cause unhappiness, perhaps serious unhappiness. But better a little now than more later.

  It took her no more than that first afternoon to discount Charity’s assumed indifference. She was as gone on him as he was on her, and the next days proved it. They could spend all day on a hike or picnic or canoe expedition and still be full of each other at dinner, almost the only time the family saw them. They could be out till all hours—twice Aunt Emily turned her flashlight on the clock when she heard Charity sneaking in, and once the clock said nearly two and the other time nearly three—and still look at one another over the breakfast table as if dazed by the wonder of what they saw.

  Aunt Emily had no idea what they did when they were together; she had to rely on Charity’s good sense. Seeing them swimming off the dock, or canoeing around the cove, she could feel a pang like regret. Charity was what she was, a most striking, vivid, headstrong, exasperating, often infuriating young woman. Sid Lang, helping her into the canoe and shoving away from the dock, was a demigod. His back was now red with sunburn and his nose was peeling, but his neck was strong and his back broad. When he dipped the paddle, the canoe shot forward as if motorized.

  Pumping him, she had brought up mainly acceptable opinions. It was true that Sid admired Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom the family was divided about because he had already indicated he would replace Aunt Emily’s brother as ambassador to France. But Sid also loved books, had earnest, high-minded ideas and a passion for poetry, felt that each individual should try to leave the world a little better than he found it. On the other hand, he was vague about the future and not at all sure that it involved teaching. He seemed to be in graduate school mainly because he couldn’t think of anything better to do. For a penniless student who ought to be burning with ambition, that seemed odd, even ominous.

  Once, half humorously, he told Aunt Emily that what he would really like to do was retire to the woods, such woods as these, where there would be books, music, beauty, and peace, and just walk and read and think and write poems, like a Chinese philosopher of the Taoist persuasion.

  They had some dinner-table arguments on that topic. Those were not the most logical years to be advocating philosophical retirement, even for poets. Poetic speech in those days was supposed to be public speech, and bring thousands to the barricades. Literature was for mobilizing the masses (the middle-class masses), Doing Good, and Righting Wrongs. So when Sid, in defense of his vague disinclination to become engaged in social betterment, enlisted poetic support, saying:

  “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

  And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made,

  Nine beanrows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee

  And live alone in the bee-loud glade”

  he started Charity to bouncing in her chair.

  “Oh, pooh, Sid! That’s a splendid poem, but it’s not a plan for a life. It’s defeatist, it’s total retreat. Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can’t have a by-product unless you’ve had a product first. It’s immoral not to get in and work and get your hands dirty.”

  “You can get your hands dirty in nine beanrows.”

  “Yes, but what are you doing? Feeding your own selfish face. Indulging your own lazy inclinations.”

  “Charity, really,” her mother said.

  Sid was not offended. “A poem isn’t selfish. It speaks to people.”

  “If it’s good enough. Has any poem ever moved you to action?”

  “I just quoted you one.”

  “That??
?s not action, that’s inaction! Really, Sid, the world needs people who will do things, not run from them.”

  “I don’t admit that poetry is running from anything, but what would you suggest instead?”

  “Teaching.”

  “Teaching what?”

  “What you’re studying. What you know.”

  “Poetry.”

  “Oh, you . . . ! You twist things. Look, there are so many empty minds in the world that teaching them anything is worthy activity. A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.”

  “And a poem doesn’t?”

  They were getting heated. No, Aunt Emily decided, only Charity was. Though Sid defended his position, he listened to her as if her warmth fascinated him. Her cheeks were rosy with vehemence. She sat back in her chair, momentarily at a loss, as if his question were unfair, and thought a moment, and burst out again.

  “You want to make me sound like a philistine. All I’m saying is that poetry isn’t direct enough most of the time. It doesn’t concern itself with the vital issues. It may be nice to know how a poet feels when he looks out his window into a fresh snowfall, but it doesn’t help anyone feed his family.”

  “Charity,” Comfort said, “you argue like a corkscrew.”

  But Sid would not accept the chance to laugh the argument away. “Let me get you straight. You think poetry isn’t communication on any significant level, but you think teaching is, even if the teacher is teaching poetry. It’s okay secondhand, but not firsthand.”

  “I told you,” Comfort said. “A corkscrew.”

  “You keep out of this,” Charity said. Her cheeks were pink. She looked aggrieved and misunderstood. “All I’m saying,” she said to Sid alone, “is that poetry-making isn’t the basis for a full life unless you’re an absolutely great poet, and forgive me, I don’t think you are, not yet anyway, and won’t be until you find something to do in your life so that the poetry reflects something. It can’t just reflect leisure. In this world you can’t have leisure unless you cheat. Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organizations. You can’t make a life out of nine beanrows. You wouldn’t have anything to write poems about but beans.”