TWENTY-EIGHT
“A FELLOW has to ask it of himself because there are so many problems,” Hollingsworth was saying. “You know, we have courses now, and some of them in very abstruse subjects I can tell you. To be a good man in the organization a knowledge of the psychological is essential.” With that he had finished cutting his nails, the product deposited neatly on the flap of an envelope which he kept to the left of him on the desk as though in opposition to the other envelope to his right, also open, which contained the shavings of three pencils he had carefully sharpened at the beginning of the interview. So he sat, the lamp behind him shining over his head into the eyes of McLeod, the envelopes serving as balance pans for the justice he would dispense.
“I’ve considered your allegations very carefully,” Hollingsworth was continuing, “but one gets to wondering what the psychological part of it is.” In reproduction of a gesture which had once belonged to McLeod, Hollingsworth touched his finger tips together lightly, judiciously. “It’s part of a case I would say,” he offered mildly, and hawked his throat. “I wonder if you would object to my just thinking aloud for a little while?”
Before there could be an answer, Lannie had interrupted. “I have a question,” she said in a low voice.
“Not now,” Hollingsworth snapped.
“No, but I …” she began.
“I said, ‘Not now.’ ” Reaching across the desk he lit a cigarette for McLeod. “Here is the way I put it to myself,” he said thoughtfully. “We have a fellow who one could call intelligent like yourself, and yet I must say it, one can’t help being struck by the idea that he acts like a fool. Now, the last thing I want to do is to be offensive”—Hollingsworth radiated geniality—“but still there’s not an awful lot he does which makes sense.”
“Would you care to specify?” McLeod slumped in his chair, the top of his head barely visible, his long legs propped for support against the table. Arms hanging at his side, his finger tips must have trailed the floor. He might have appeared wholly patient, wholly passive, if it were not so evident that the glare of the lamp had begun to affect him.
“Let’s look at it. It seems to me that for something to make sense, there’s got to be a balance; you know one side has to weigh as much as the other.”
“No balance here?”
Again the finger tips touched. “Not much, a fellow would have to say.” Hollingsworth separated his hands, then pressed them lightly against the table. “In one of the courses we were instructed in, there was a great deal about what we called the psychology of the Bolshevists, and in it we were taught that these fellows thought they could change the history of the world, and naturally like everybody else they thought they were doing it for world betterment. Now, to take the fellow we been talking about all this time, he undoubtedly reasoned that way, and so everything he did there was a purpose to it. And no matter how terrible we might think those things would be, world betterment was the idea. So he could go ahead and do all that.” Abruptly, Hollingsworth chuckled. “Only the poor fellow decided he was wrong, and so he quit them. What is his psychology now?”
“I’ll go on, thank you. He feels very bad we can suppose. Here are all those terrible things he’s done, and how can he change all that? Well, first of all he goes to work for the people I represent, and that doesn’t pan out so well, now does it? He feels even worse, and so he has to take something to make up for it, and that he does, and then here he is now.”
“Except for his theoretical work.”
“Yes, I’m so glad you mentioned that. Except for his theoretical work.” Hollingsworth reached deftly into his brief case, and deposited a pile of mimeographed pamphlets on the table. “We have here the sum total of the said fellow’s work. I can enumerate all the categories of subjects treated, but why bore you with something you know already? The thing that’s more interesting is that out of all these articles and pamphlets we’ve made a list of the circulation, and the one that was read by the most people numbers five hundred readers.” He fanned them out upon the desk, and touched his finger to one and then another as though he were examining samples. “This one had a hundred and fifty readers; this one, two hundred twenty-five; this one, seventy-five; this one, fifty.” Hollingsworth yawned. “These figures are all in round numbers, of course.”
“What point do you make?” McLeod asked.
“Well, it’s very difficult for me to understand,” Hollingsworth began. Before he could continue, however, Lannie had clutched a page from one of the papers, and read the title. She put it down. “You didn’t write this,” she said to McLeod in a strangled voice.
He nodded.
“No, he didn’t write it,” Lannie was on her feet now. “It’s you he’s swindling, you!” she screeched at Hollingsworth.
“He wrote it,” Hollingsworth said quietly, studying her outburst.
“It’s impossible,” she cried, and now she was pleading for herself. “Contradictions and class relations in the land across the sea, as he puts it. Yes, he may have written it, his hand, his ink, and so you’re convinced, but all the while he was writing he laughed because he never believed a word of it.”
Hollingsworth merely stared at her, his silence weighing upon her speech until the effect cumulative, she was quiet at last. “I told you,” he said, clearing his throat, “that there would be twists and turns.”
“You’re wrong,” she managed to blurt out.
“Very well, then, I’m wrong,” he said, and unable to restrain himself, began to laugh at her. “Yes, I’m sure wrong.”
She was back in her seat, but the chair gave small comfort. Her body pressed against the wood, her stained fingers plucked cuticle from her ragged nails, and her poor soft lips fluttered one against the other. “I …” she started to say.
“Be quiet now,” Hollingsworth said. With evident distaste he rearranged the papers she had strewn and consulted his notes.
“Applying statistical methods,” he informed McLeod, “a fellow can see that the average circulation of these pamphlets is one hundred and ninety-eight point three people per unit of political propaganda.”
McLeod said wryly, “I’d often wondered what it was.”
“This is the point I’ve been trying to make,” Hollingsworth went on. “A fellow who has as many things to keep him up at night as the gentleman we’ve been discussing, seems to think that to balance it out, all he has to do is to write these articles. I suppose he’s trying to make the plus equal the minus. But one is forced to think this fellow in question has a very interesting arithmetic. Because the way I figure it is that he’s down about a million, and every one of these things is worth maybe ten off the score.”
“The difference between you and me,” McLeod said, “is that I depend upon potentiality. Who are you to state that in a decade there will be no possibility for new revolutionary ferments?”
“Assess the plus and minus,” Hollingsworth intoned.
“There is still the future. And if there will be a revolutionary situation and revolutionaries of stature, then it is of the utmost importance the lessons of the last revolution be learned.” He sat there blinking his eyes slowly into the glare of the light bulb, while across the tight skin of his face, steadily, involuntarily, a tremor rippled through the flat muscle of his cheek. “Why do you insist?” he asked finally, querulously.
“Because you want to influence people,” Hollingsworth said shortly. “And when people want to influence people, then that falls into the area of my occupation.” He sighed heavily. “And I am obliged to question your qualifications. For example would you say that the gentleman mentioned was in complete possession of all faculties at the time he was so active in said and aforementioned Mediterranean country?”
“What do you mean by faculties?”
“There’s a better answer than that,” Hollingsworth suggested. “Take the time he goes with the revolver in his pocket to see his old political friend. Can you say he found no enjoyment at all in the events of the evening?”
“None.”
Hollingsworth made a deprecatory sound with his tongue. “You’re an intelligent fellow. Would anybody feel bad for all of four or five hours, talking to somebody, knowing he’s going to kill him?
“I don’t know any more.”
“No pleasure at all?”
McLeod raised a hand to his temple. “How can I remember?”
“In other words, some pleasure. That’s looked down upon, isn’t it?” Hollingsworth nodded to answer his own question. “The fellow we’re considering has an unhealthy psychological part to him one is forced to conclude.”
“All right.”
“This unhealthy part affects all his actions. An eminent specialist in these matters told me so. We think we have an idea just cause it’s an idea, but the truth is we have such and such an idea because we want it so.”
“All right,” McLeod said tonelessly.
“One is forced to conclude politics is the bunk and so are opinions.”
“All right.”
“Then,” Hollingsworth continued rigorously, “how can a fellow pretend to act for the future?”
“All right, all right. All right,” McLeod said.
Hollingsworth adjusted the lamp so it shone equitably between them. In a gentle voice, he continued. “Now, unlike most people, I don’t look down on such a fellow. We all have our different characters, and that’s true. It’s just that we mustn’t be stubborn. You’ve been an unhappy man all your life, and you didn’t want to admit it was your own fault. So you blame it on society, as you call it. That isn’t necessary. You could have had a good time, you could still have a good time if you’d realize that everybody is like you, and so it’s pointless to work for the future.” His hand strayed over the desk. He might have been caressing the wood. “More modesty. We ain’t equipped to deal with big things. If this fellow came to me and asked my advice, I would take him aside and let him know that if he gives up the pursuits of vanity, and acts like everybody else, he’d get along better. Cause we never know what’s deep down inside us”—Hollingsworth tapped his chest—“and it plays tricks. I don’t give two cents for all your papers. A good-time Charley, that’s myself, and that’s why I’m smarter than the lot of you.” His pale face had become flushed. “You can shove theory,” he said suddenly. “Respect your father and mother.”
“He’s absolutely right,” Lannie exclaimed. “But then he isn’t. I mean …” she finished lamely, jerkily, the outburst of her private thought amputated as she heard her voice. And flushing at her inability to express what she would say, she continued to stare at her hands, and in a morose energy pulled cuticle from her nail.
McLeod smiled wanly.
“Have you got a cigarette?” he asked. “It seems I’m out of them.”
“I’d be delighted,” Hollingsworth said, furnishing tobacco and flame in what was almost a single gesture.
“Would you call yourself a realist?” McLeod asked almost dreamily.
“That’s the word a fellow would employ for me.”
“Then, philosophically speaking, you believe in a real world.”
“More words,” Hollingsworth sighed. “I’ll say yes.”
“A world which exists separately from ourselves.”
“Oh, yes, that was what I wanted to say.”
“You didn’t,” McLeod told him. “I want to point out to you that no one may be disqualified from coming close to a knowledge of the relations of such a world. One’s psychological warp, upon which you harp so greedily, may be precisely the peculiar lens necessary to see those relations most clearly.”
“You’re trying to confuse me,” Hollingsworth said.
McLeod was silent for almost a minute, and as if the brief foray had encouraged him by its success, he looked up at last with a grin. “I would like to make a speech in my defense.”
“No.” Hollingsworth almost stood up. “We’ve gotten nowhere today, and none of the practical issues have been decided. You don’t need a speech.”
“First you must fulfill conditions.”
The muscle quivering, the eye blinking, McLeod held up his hand and watched it tremble independently of himself. “I am prepared to,” he said. “But I want to know whether it goes to you directly or to your organization?”
“I haven’t made up my mind,” Hollingsworth said, “but that shouldn’t affect you. You have to be willing to concede either way, or no speech.”
“Either way,” McLeod said with a shrug. “May I proceed?”
Hollingsworth nodded.
“You know,” McLeod said, “there was a time when I thought the last speech I might make would begin in quite another way. Once, I even composed it. ‘Citizen comrades,’ I began, ‘there seems small justification possible that a renegade like myself, a wrecking dog of the lowest litter should even open his mouth.’ ” McLeod’s mouth opened in a soundless laugh.
“One of the small benefits I can permit myself is to spend no time apologizing for my past. It is what it is, and in the time permitted me here, I should prefer to indulge in the only meaningful defense, to transmit the intellectual conclusions of my life, and thus give dignity to my experience. I shall not treat the past as personal history, and I will attempt to delineate what I believe to be the future, for it is only as ideas are transmitted to someone else that they attain existence.”
Hollingsworth interrupted him. “You talk like a fellow who doesn’t think he’s going to live long.”
“You misunderstand. I speak metaphorically.”
“All I care about is that you concede,” Hollingsworth said sullenly.
“I told you I would. Now, may I go ahead?”
“Who are you making this speech for?” Hollingsworth asked peevishly. “Me? Miss Madison?” His eyes met mine, and he shrugged. “Well, if you think it’s worth your waste of time, go right ahead, but I don’t hold the high opinion of your friend that you seem to.” He looked away and tapped his fingers. “Go ahead, make your speech,” he said in what was almost a womanish voice.