The Oasis Read Online Free PDF Page A

physical survival of the colony was more important than a mere demonstration of principle—a strong and self-confident Utopia could perhaps afford a murderer, but a Utopia not yet consolidated must defer this luxury until a later date. Fortunately, perhaps, the point remained academic. No murderers or thieves applied, only ordinary peopleof ordinary B-plus morality, people whose crimes, that is, had been confined to an intimate circle, and who had never injured anybody but a close friend, a relation, a wife, a husband, themselves. There were no saints in Utopia, and none that believed themselves saintly. The only saint with whom the colonists were personally acquainted had disappeared in a darkened city of Europe and was believed by the American consul to be, very probably, dead.
    To members of the purist faction, the absence of this man was terrible, for it was from him, an Italian anarchist in possession of his first papers, a veteran of the Spanish war and of Vichy’s prisons, a lover of Plato and Tolstoy, a short pink-and-black man with a monk’s tonsure of baldness and a monk’s barrel chest, that they had learned certain notions of justice, freedom, and sociability which now, long after he had left them, they were endeavoring to illustrate in action. The realistic party, on the other hand, while sympathizing vividly with his American wife (far more indeed than the purists, who thought principally of the loss to themselves) and urging attention to the case upon various acquaintances in the State Department, regarded the absence of the Founder as, on the whole, a blessing. They feared, above everything else, that Utopia, like Oneida, Brook Farm, and the phalansteries, would make itself a laughing-stock by the advocacy of extreme ideas. To them Utopia was justified on sheerly practical grounds, a retreat from atomic warfare, a summer-vacation colony, a novelty in personalrelations; and though in their hearts they too hoped for some millennial outcome of the experiment, for the reign of justice and happiness, they shrank from a definition of the colony which committed them to any positive belief. Conspicuous goodness, like the Founder’s, filled them with uneasy embarrassment; they looked upon it as a form of simple-mindedness on a par with vegetarianism, and would have refused admission to Heaven on the ground that it was full of greenhorns and cranks.
    That the purists had different ideas about Utopia, the realists were well aware, and well aware too that there existed in the other faction certain plans for their moral transformation in which they had not been included. That the other side was banking on the isolation of the mountaintop, the soft influences of Nature, the gentle admonitions of example, to bring out the best in them, they had seen from the beginning. But they had no intention of being changed or improved, and they smiled among themselves at this childish conspiracy, which seemed to them the final proof of their opponents’ naïveté. The prospect of remaining unregenerate and defeating the purists’ hopes excited in them a mood of zestful anticipation; it gave salt to the whole project, which otherwise they would have found insipid.
    The dark features of Will Taub, leader of the realist party, had contorted into an expression of malicious triumph when he heard that a lady purist had lightly pronounced him “salvageable.” “Idiots!” hethunderously proclaimed, pounding his fist on his coffee-table, upsetting a highball over the manuscript of a rather proprietary article on Tocqueville which he was preparing for the press. Up to this moment, he had been uncertain as to whether or not to blacklist Utopia, and his visitor, in fact, had relied on the bit of gossip to goad him into a decision, for, like many other spiteful people who infested Bohemian circles during that era, the busybody now seated on Taub’s sofa was actively campaigning against the formation of a colony which threatened no