XII

Jael was at breakfast alone the next day, about noon, when Capuchin arrived. She had the morning paper propped up before her and was just reading the news that Parshall had resigned as President of the People’s Bank and gone to live in California. Ground, ill health. No successor had been named. There were rumors of dissension in the Freemen’s League, the paper said, and a sense of disillusionment among the people.

Capuchin couldn’t remember whether he had eaten his breakfast or should be hungry. First he said he was not hungry; then he said he was. When food was before him he devoured it angrily in large quantities and gulped his coffee steam first.

He had a somewhat soiled appearance, from having traveled in haste, without all of the necessary things, and was unshaven.

Not at all fastidious as a rule about the way men looked, Jael noticed his unkemptness and was not admiring it, perhaps because he was thinking so well of himself. There was no reason why he should not have taken the time to shave and change his linen. It was not that he had not thought of it. He had, and then decided to appear as he was, with the notion that such carelessness’ was privileged and somehow enhanced his significance as a man of action. He had the vanity to believe it would be admired. Men are not admired of women for the reasons they think nor ever when and as they fancy themselves; always otherwise for different reasons, reasons they never guess, and in moments they are least conscious of.

Never before had Capuchin impressed Jael so unfavorably. It occurred to her that she disliked him.

“Mr. Parshall has left you,” she said, nodding her head at the news.

“It’s out, is it?” said Capuchin. “You do read the newspapers. I haven’t read them.”

Jael’s wit, alert and critical, instantly penetrated this large and silly make-believe of not having seen the newspapers. He had. “Well, he’s gone,” he added. “He’d better not talk. He hasn’t so far. I’ve warned him not to.”

“About what?” Jael asked.

“Anything at all, said Capuchin. “That’s the understanding. He’s a scoundrel at large.”

“Is it serious?”

“It will be serious for him if he doesn’t hold his smoke,” said Capuchin. His answers were short, almost rude. This was not as he had meant the conversation to begin. So he changed it forcibly.

He wished to talk first about Plaino. That old crater had been gathering heat and wickedness for some time and was now on the point of becoming active. A red card printer working in a job office where Plaino was having tons of anti-League matter printed had brought him examples of it. None of it had yet appeared, but when it did they should have their hands full.

“Did you bring any of it along? I’d like to see it,” said Jael.

He had not. She would see enough of it.

“What is it like?” she asked.

“It’s only a lot of immaterial stuff we all know,” he said. “I mean things we know ourselves and don’t talk about. Nothing important by itself. It’s the way he brings it all together. Facts about the mill and the packing plant and so on. Temporary facts such as people make too much of because they don’t understand the difficulties. Naturally you can’t tell them everything—every little thing that happens or goes wrong. You don’t tell yourself everything, do you?”

“I try to,” said Jael.

“Maybe you do,” he said, looking at her and then away. “As I say, it isn’t so much anything Plaino’s got as the way he puts it together to make it look as if we had been concealing our whole back yard.”

“That’s true, isn’t it?” said Jael. “You have been concealing it. You’ve suppressed these facts for fear they would make the people uneasy. Now when somebody begins to tell them it is you are uneasy.”

“Semicorn uses that word suppress,” said Capuchin, irritably. “Suppress! Suppress! What does it mean? There’s no such thing as saying everything, telling everything, printing everything. Why did we get control of the press to begin with? So we could print our own news in our own way. That was why. No other reason. Now everybody says we’ve been suppressing the facts. I don’t like the word. If you leave out the vitals of truth, on purpose, that is suppression. We’ve never done that. We’ve printed what was vital. The truth as we saw it.”

He was becoming unpleasantly excited.

“Well, go on. What more of Plaino?” said Jael.

“He hasn’t started to yet, that I know of,” said Capuchin, “but what I’m afraid of is he will attack Mr. Dwind’s bank. If we got a run on the bank I don’t know what might happen.”

“Mr. Dwind’s bank,” said Jael, repeating him.

“Yes,” said Capuchin, doggedly. “We took it just as he said. We didn’t even read the law, not until afterward.”

“You think Plaino would do that?” Jael asked.

“Do that! He would do anything. He would start a run on his own bank if he thought that would hurt the League.”

“Well, go on again,” said Jael.

“The day I left,” said Capuchin, “we had a meeting of the directors. I’m not a director, you know. I’m not in it at all, in fact. Only of course I was there. Parshall’s quitting had brought matters to a head. The only trouble with the bank is it needs money. Its assets are good. As the saying is, they’re frozen. That means they can’t be turned into money. They’re very tight for ready money, the bank is. If they had a run on it, they tell me, they couldn’t hold out an hour.”

“Yes,” said Jael.

Her coldness, touched with irony, damaged his style and caused him to do his worst. She was forcing him to the point, not as he intended coming to it, but in her way.

“That’s all,” he said. “It’s what I’ve come to see you for. If you could take over some of those assets for cash, those farmers’ notes and unpaid checks, some flour mill bills, perhaps,... or, if you didn’t like that, a deposit in cash would help.... It’s all perfectly good, understand.”

“I’ve already put a lot of money there, you know,” said Jael. “My bankers have warned me it isn’t safe.”

That statement set him off on a wild philippic against Wall street, bankers, privileged interests.

Of course they would tell her it wasn’t safe. They were in a conspiracy to ruin the bank. Any other bank in the same circumstances would have only to take its frozen paper to Minneapolis, Chicago or New York and get bright, new Federal money for it. Could the People’s Bank do this? No, indeed. Why? Because the U. S. Treasury, the Federal government itself, had joined in that conspiracy.

Jael let him go.

When he subsided, she said: “On one condition. The condition is that I may send auditors of my own to go over the books of the People’s Bank. On their report I shall decide.”

This was the most unexpected thing she could have said. Capuchin was injured, estranged; also, as she could see, alarmed.

“There are no honest auditors,” he said, beginning to walk rapidly to and fro with a singular gesture of the arms, working them as if he had dumbbells in his fists, with an upward slant. “They will make a bad report,” he said. “They’d have to. They are prejudiced to begin with. I wouldn’t trust one of them with my hat.”

She was firm and silent.

“How long do you suppose it would take?” he asked, presently.

“I could send them today,” she said. “I should follow them myself and be there to see they lost no time.”

Suddenly he veered around.

“Good!” he said. “Plenty good!” He shook hands with her twice. “Everything’s all right,” he added. “There’s nothing that can’t be properly explained, unless maybe some of Parshall’s work, and he’s gone. He was really...! Well, I’d hate to tell you. A bad worker. That’s all.”

With that he went.

Jael sat musing.

Putting it on the frog. Dwind unloading on Capuchin. Now Capuchin unloading on Dwind and Parshall.

She was disgusted. The specific facts as they afterward developed surprised her not at all. She had already a complete sense of the situation. Dwind’s revelation the night before followed by this interview with Capuchin left her in no doubt of the disagreeable truth. The New Freedom experiment was in desperate trouble.

Two questions were before her. One was a question of immediate measures. That could not be settled until she had got a report on the bank. She called to Miss Lillibridge to get her banker on the telephone, the one who had warned her; she told him what she needed. That night six expert accountants departed for Liberty, with a formal letter from Jael to Capuchin saying these were the auditors and please to let them see the books.

The other question was complicated. What of her personal relation to New Freedom?

Her pride was in it. The pride of the Lothian College was in it. But it was much more than a matter of pride. That she had got a great deal of money involved in it gave her no anxiety. She had parted with the money freely, in the belief that it was promoting a social service. This had been the first outlet for her wealth that was both adequate and satisfying. It fulfilled her desire, which was to employ it in a manner to justify her father’s acquisition of it to begin with and her custody of it afterward. All of her other works, the Lothian College included, scarcely absorbed her annual income. Here she was putting forth the principal, not merely the accretions, and that gave her the feeling she wanted.

She was not insensible of the praise bestowed upon her by the illuminati nor of the public esteem in which she was held, even by many who disbelieved in the things she did. Yet in all matters a realist, she knew her own motives. They were not unselfish. The chief one was to redeem the Saint-Leon millions from the stigma they bore when she received them. In this she had succeeded.

Now she asked herself if she would give the whole of her fortune to save the New Freedom experiment. After hard and honest reflection she answered herself, saying, “Yes, provided—” Yes. Provided what? Provided the experiment was sound. Was it? There was the root of the question. Grave doubts tormented her.

To say nothing of the money, the best radical intelligence there was had gone into it. The Lothian College people had gone so far in their work with Capuchin as to make a scientific study of the people by racial groups in order to conduct the propaganda efficiently. The Swedes, for example, loved to be entertained in a joyous manner; the Norwegians preferred long speeches, to which they would listen stolidly for hours on end. So, picnics for Swedes were not like picnics for Norwegians. They had taken pains to that degree. They had said in the beginning—Dwind, for one, had said it, as she distinctly recalled—that here was the perfect opportunity to prove the case of the people against capitalism.

Well, they had had the situation entirely in their own hands. No assistance had been withheld. And what had they done with it?

A bank full of frozen assets.

Unloading the blame on one another.

Afraid of one asthmatic old man who was threatening to tell the facts.

Afraid themselves to tell the facts.

Suppressing them in the people’s own newspapers.

Had they been too intelligent? too clever? What had they left out? Was it wisdom? innate knowing? a way of reference above intelligence? Or had this disappointment been inevitable in human contradiction?

She had been trying to make Fitzjerald talk about it, his view being always so contrary; but he had turned her off, except once to make an oracular observation, which was, “You cannot dispense with the principle of growth. You may know all about a tree and yet you cannot invent one.”

Lately she had submerged herself in history. Was there any clear meaning in the historical process? She saw this process as an endless chain turning on a wheel of which only a segment of the upper rim was visible. People rising, rising, rising, as far back as one could see. Rising always to overthrow something, overthrowing it, then recreating it again, not invariably in the same detail but in the same principle. Seeing it in this way became a phantasy.

It occurred to her that if only the people had the wit to walk slowly backward against the direction of the wheel they might stay up forever; instead, they looked back and stood still and were forever carried on by the endless chain, rising with it suddenly to the plane of view, crossing that plane in an arc, disappearing again to the right.

They knew what they wanted. To be free!

From the moment of appearing out of obscurity at the left to the moment of disappearing into it again at the right, all the way through the arc, they were chanting: “Freedom! Freedom! We know a way to be free!”

She could not make out whether they were fast to the chain actually or merely behaved in that way under a fixed delusion of locomotion, or of progress, from a sense of movement in time, unable to distinguish between that and a movement of their own making.

From this reading, which was voracious and absorbed her whole imagination, she emerged with no convictions. Only much more doubt.

Formulas for freedom such as formerly she had not examined critically now started echoes in her mind, echoes of the song she heard in her phantasy of the wheel, the rim, the endless chain turning upon it—the song, “Freedom! Freedom! We know a way to be free!”

What were the Russians saying night after night at her board? That song again.

She was not horrified at anything the Russians had done to set themselves free. The fact that troubled her was that they had smashed the Romanoff rule only to bind themselves to a dictatorship that condemned dissenters to exile and death, limited liberty more than it had been limited before and repressed free speech, saying what tyranny always says, “This is for the good of people.”

At this time she made a random note of her mind.

“When people talk of freedom,” she wrote, “do they know what they mean? I do not. Where is this freedom? In nature? There every living thing must obey the law. The penalty for revolt is sudden death. People cannot be economically free. They have their bodies to keep. They cannot be spiritually free. Fear is their bondage. Fear of God or fear of the unknown. I, myself, now that I walk alone, thinking my own thoughts, am I free? I deliver myself from the opinions of others and find myself bound by the tyranny of doubt. One may believe a false thing and still act. One who doubts is spread taut between yes and no. That one cannot move at all, not even in agony.”

On reading what she had written she said, “Sounds like Angus. Even more so.” Then she tore it up, remembering as she did it the words of her strange father, that she had his mind and it would be her curse. Was that why she tore it up? She asked herself. No. She went back. First the writing. Next the association of it with Angus. Then a memory of her father; his words about her mind. But just beneath and much more poignant, though unacknowledged, was the recollection of what he had said at the same time about the kind of man she ought to marry. One with red hair. One like Angus. And it was that had made her tear the piece of writing up. Symbolic gesture, dismissing a troublesome thought. “I think too much,” she said, drifting the fragments slowly into the waste basket.

What did at last determine her attitude toward New Freedom was nothing that occurred in her mind. It was feeling. A feeling of personal responsibility and a feeling of loyalty to the Lothian College people. They did believe earnestly in what they were doing. Such sincerity, even wrongly applied, could not be wasted. It was bound to prove something. And the least she could do would be to stand by them.