The Oasis Read Online Free PDF

interest of his and was wholly pacific and benevolent, so that long before Utopia had crystallized, an anti-Utopian movement of the most definite character existed, and men and women were calling on their friends, trying to dissuade them from the project, against which their only conceivable grudge was the fear of not being invited, and giving more time and energy to this cause than they had ever been able to summon up for the fight, say, against fascism or Stalinism. In the case of Will Taub, however, the visitor had made an error. He was not sufficiently versed in his host’s ingenious psychology to guess that the slug, which he had just inserted in the mechanism, would hit the jackpot, but in a manner quite unexpected. “ Salvage ,” Taub softly exclaimed. “I’d like to see that,” and he gave the peculiar short harsh laugh that was indicative of his polemical humor. “We’ll go,” he abruptly announced, tapping his wife familiarly on the shoulder, as if to apprise her that a show was about to begin into which he had privately written a sardonicstar part for himself. His wife, inured to surprises, merely raised her penciled eyebrows. Taub’s imagination continued to work. “What fools they’ll make of themselves. It will be marvelous ,” he cried, nudging his visitor this time, and rolling slightly on the sofa. The tip of his tongue fastened itself against his lower teeth, and the center broadened and protruded in a truly malignant fashion as he emitted another grating laugh, vainglorious and taunting. “A-a-ah,” he exclaimed, and the visitor, half-forgotten, felt embarrassed and even slightly frightened by the directness of this hostility. “It was quite strange,” he later declared. “He positively stuck his tongue out. Do you think I was wrong to tell him? I feel quite alarmed for the Utopians.”
    Yet Will Taub in reality was not wholly displeased by the remark which had been repeated to him. Something shy and childlike in his nature felt obscurely flattered by the judgment. He and his whole party, to tell the truth, would have been glad to be redeemed or “salvaged,” if this could only be accomplished privately, and without the loss of that ideological supremacy which had become essential to their existence. As inheritors of “scientific” socialism, they based themselves on Marx and Engels, and though they had discarded the dialectic and the labor theory of value and repudiated with violence whatever historical process was going on behind the iron curtain, their whole sense of intellectual assurance rested on the fixed belief in the potency of history to settle questions of value. The failure of socialism in their time, the ascendancyof the new slave state were for them, therefore, an excruciating personal humiliation. To identify their survival with the arms of Western capitalism had been a natural step, but one which they took uneasily and with a certain semantic embarrassment—they showed far less constraint in characterizing the opponents of this policy as childish, unrealistic, unhistorical, etc., than in formulating a rhetoric of democratic ideals.
    They had accepted as their historic mission the awakening of the let to the dangers of Red totalitarianism, and this task, with the aid of actual developments, they had accomplished with credit, but history itself (surely their real enemy) had superseded them, taking matters into its own hands, while the ungrateful let had failed to reward them with the unquestioning trust and obedience which they felt to be the logical sequel, and kept demanding, in articles, book reviews and private conversation, that they produce new ideas or else yield place to their juniors. As they patiently searched out the pages of Marx and Engels for precedents for a policy of “critical support” to governments, others, more reckless than they, hurried on ahead of them to rediscover the blessings of capitalism; still others remained obstinately true to the axioms