Seed on the Wind

Unfailingly Lewis arrived on Sunday, throughout the year, just in time for the midday dinner, which was at twelve-thirty precisely; Lillian never missed it more than five minutes either way, and Lewis was never late. He always had something for each of the children, and he was careful that Julian’s gift should not be more desirable or costly than the others. Albert occasionally rode out with him, but ordinarily came on the train somewhat earlier and walked up from the station. All seven of them ate together, Julian and Morris and Panther on high chairs and Roy on a regular chair, so low his chin could have rested on the tabletop. Lora was well aware that Lewis behaved admirably; she knew, for instance, that he thought children should eat by themselves and should not speak when adults were talking, but he continued to accept the arrangement without a murmur and maintained an unruffled temper even when his twentieth attempt to get a sentence out was smothered in the general hilarity. He permitted himself to offer correction only when a personal issue arose between himself and one of them, and he never presumed to impose rules of conduct. This applied to Julian as strictly as to the others; it was of course as remarkable and admirable as to Lora it seemed, but she might have found it all provided for in paragraphs 14 and 15 of the contract which lay forgotten in the wooden box. Sunday evening there would be a light supper just before the children’s bedtime, and when that was over Lewis would go to the kitchen and give Lillian a two-dollar bill — always laying it on the table and always saying, “For the extra trouble”—tell the children goodbye by patting them on the head, take Lora’s hand and hold it a moment, and depart. Albert always rode back to town with him; only two or three times in four years did either ever spend the night, and then the couch in the living room was utilized. Lora wondered what they talked about during the ninety-minute ride. She knew they rarely saw each other in town, but she had a suspicion that Lewis was helping Albert in his newly projected venture as an art dealer.

After four years she remained aloof from Maidstone. There were agreeable casual contacts, but that was all. It was a bridge and golf community, but she hardly knew that much about it. During the first six months she had refused two or three invitations, giving the children and baby as an excuse, and had never returned the four or five calls she had received. This created a little atmosphere, but subsequent accidental encounters at the grocery or the drugstore, or on the sidewalk, had made it so obvious that she was totally unconcerned in the matter, one way or the other, that finally she was accepted on her own terms, and even, eventually, ceased to be a topic of general debate.

She had no arguments with life. At the age of thirty-three she remained as devoid of intellectual attitude as a cat, though she had by no means lacked exposure to that contagion — running all the way from the diluted second-hand humanism of her high school English teacher to the anarchic egoism of Pete Halliday and the unlabelled and confused vagaries of Albert Scher. It was not so much a failure in comprehension as it was a constitutional immunity. When on a Sunday afternoon Albert Scher — if in winter — sprawled on the living-room rug in front of the divan on which she and Lewis Kane were seated, or — in summer — lay on the soft grass under the big maple tree with his heels in the air, and demonstrated that the only progress possible to man was esthetic progress, she knew well enough what he was driving at, but she was as completely unconcerned as if he had been proving that apple sauce was made out of apples.

Or perhaps Albert would be expounding one of his various theories of art. Art, he would say, is merely one aspect of man’s unremitting effort to triumph over nature. That’s all right, Lewis would put in, if by triumph over you mean understand. Not at all, Albert would retort, not understand; conquer, defeat. For centuries man tried to put it over nature by showing that he could surpass her in the beauty of his creations. I’ll show you how clumsy you are, he said to her, look, when did you ever make a woman or a tree or a blending of light and shade as lovely as that? But one day not so long ago it was decided that that game was played out. No more could be done, all the old tunes were stale, so he determined to turn his challenge upside down. You think you’re beautiful, eh? he sneered. My god, let me show you, here’s what you really look like; and he produced a million masterpieces of ugliness. Nature, of course, has remained stolidly unaffected in either case, but meanwhile man has his fun. It is an excellent arrangement that nature is provided with no technique for surrender, otherwise there would be nothing left to live for.