costumes, free love even, and the children running about naked.
Nothing could have been better calculated to disturb his preconceptions than the 1910 summer hotel into which he found himself moving his drawing board. Of all periods in American history, the age of Taft made the least appeal to his imagination; he remembered it too well for it to hold for him any charm or mystery. Progress, in fact, to his mind, was measured against that era. Electric light, radio, television,labor-saving devices for the housewife, the abolition of piece-work, the tractor, all the benefits to mankind that had been developed within his memory, seemed to him to have ameliorated beyond estimate the life of the average person; and though he believed that there had been some tendency to substitute mechanical pleasure for living (a favorite doctrine with him), to depend too uncreatively on the juke-box, the movies, and the automobile, he considered this merely a misapplication of inventions basically good. He knew that he himself could set off tomorrow with a bowie-knife and a compass and forge out a life for himself, should atomic raids oblige it, but he was too chivalrous to dream of this as a solution for the problems of mankind in general (what would become of poor Eva?), and the idea that the splitting of the atom was in any way evil in itself had never entered his mind. The derogation of technology that was going on all around him was something strange to his ears; it struck him as slightly blasphemous, and he hoped that his wife would not hear it. The notion, moreover, that the past thirty-five years, the whole of his adult life, had been misspent by society, a notion that seemed to be current on the lawn, in the kitchen, in the lounge, filled him with consternation. He felt disillusioned with the colonists and did not know what to think.
On the porch, waiting for Eva to call him to supper (irregular meals were bad for a diabetic condition), he experienced a sudden antagonism to Macdougal Macdermott, who sat laughing over a yellowed newspaperwith a picture of a doughboy on the front page. Joe himself had fought in that war; indeed, his manhood had been seasoned in it—today, in his son’s old fatigue uniform, rolled up in the legs, with his slightly belligerent stance, he looked the veteran still, though grey and almost visibly aging, as though time were galloping through him like a horse racing to the finish. Amour propre urged him to insist that the first war had been necessary (he was not so sure about the second, in which his son had been wounded—Hitler, he thought now, should have been stopped in the Rhineland), but his positiveness was shaken by a sense that the bearded man’s self-assured laughter proceeded from obvious certainties to which only he was a stranger. He felt hurt, in his memories, the most defenseless part, and, unable to digest an emotion except through the catharsis of action, cast about for a way of making this clear to the others. A brace of partridge rising from the hill suggested the material for an object-lesson, a form of admonition, which had never failed him with his children or his salesmen. “Get them laughing, get them thinking,” he quoted, and went up to his room for his gun. In a few moments the party on the verandah saw him emerge onto the lawn, shoulder arms comically, and march off in drill-step singing “Over There.” “What’s up?” ejaculated Macdermott, interrupting himself briefly to cast a baffled glance at the manufacturer. A fellow intellectual shrugged. “Good hunting, Mr. Lockman!” trilled an oblivious voice from an upstairs window, serene in its malentendu. The rebuke had missed fire; no one had caught his meaning; and, half-puzzled, half-dismayed, Joe, still in march-time, his thin-skinned face knotted in conflict, vanished into the trees.
Up above, in the meadow, flushing the long grasses for game, he came upon Will Taub, still standing on the peak. Joe had no way of knowing
Nothing could have been better calculated to disturb his preconceptions than the 1910 summer hotel into which he found himself moving his drawing board. Of all periods in American history, the age of Taft made the least appeal to his imagination; he remembered it too well for it to hold for him any charm or mystery. Progress, in fact, to his mind, was measured against that era. Electric light, radio, television,labor-saving devices for the housewife, the abolition of piece-work, the tractor, all the benefits to mankind that had been developed within his memory, seemed to him to have ameliorated beyond estimate the life of the average person; and though he believed that there had been some tendency to substitute mechanical pleasure for living (a favorite doctrine with him), to depend too uncreatively on the juke-box, the movies, and the automobile, he considered this merely a misapplication of inventions basically good. He knew that he himself could set off tomorrow with a bowie-knife and a compass and forge out a life for himself, should atomic raids oblige it, but he was too chivalrous to dream of this as a solution for the problems of mankind in general (what would become of poor Eva?), and the idea that the splitting of the atom was in any way evil in itself had never entered his mind. The derogation of technology that was going on all around him was something strange to his ears; it struck him as slightly blasphemous, and he hoped that his wife would not hear it. The notion, moreover, that the past thirty-five years, the whole of his adult life, had been misspent by society, a notion that seemed to be current on the lawn, in the kitchen, in the lounge, filled him with consternation. He felt disillusioned with the colonists and did not know what to think.
On the porch, waiting for Eva to call him to supper (irregular meals were bad for a diabetic condition), he experienced a sudden antagonism to Macdougal Macdermott, who sat laughing over a yellowed newspaperwith a picture of a doughboy on the front page. Joe himself had fought in that war; indeed, his manhood had been seasoned in it—today, in his son’s old fatigue uniform, rolled up in the legs, with his slightly belligerent stance, he looked the veteran still, though grey and almost visibly aging, as though time were galloping through him like a horse racing to the finish. Amour propre urged him to insist that the first war had been necessary (he was not so sure about the second, in which his son had been wounded—Hitler, he thought now, should have been stopped in the Rhineland), but his positiveness was shaken by a sense that the bearded man’s self-assured laughter proceeded from obvious certainties to which only he was a stranger. He felt hurt, in his memories, the most defenseless part, and, unable to digest an emotion except through the catharsis of action, cast about for a way of making this clear to the others. A brace of partridge rising from the hill suggested the material for an object-lesson, a form of admonition, which had never failed him with his children or his salesmen. “Get them laughing, get them thinking,” he quoted, and went up to his room for his gun. In a few moments the party on the verandah saw him emerge onto the lawn, shoulder arms comically, and march off in drill-step singing “Over There.” “What’s up?” ejaculated Macdermott, interrupting himself briefly to cast a baffled glance at the manufacturer. A fellow intellectual shrugged. “Good hunting, Mr. Lockman!” trilled an oblivious voice from an upstairs window, serene in its malentendu. The rebuke had missed fire; no one had caught his meaning; and, half-puzzled, half-dismayed, Joe, still in march-time, his thin-skinned face knotted in conflict, vanished into the trees.
Up above, in the meadow, flushing the long grasses for game, he came upon Will Taub, still standing on the peak. Joe had no way of knowing
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