470
PARTISAN REVIEW
pushing the parcels nearer and nearer to the clerk. He paid and
walked briskly now through the store into the street. It was beginning
to rain, a perspired little summer rain. He hardly felt it as he dashed
across the street into his house. Up through the elevator now and all
would be solved. Peasants marching and singing the Marseillaise, all
that he had learned would be true. His chair, and the warmth inside
him
woul~
clear his mind. He would be Auerbach again, the historian,
one of the many, the tireless workers who put down a few lines in
the story of the beginning of Western civilization.
That was it, he told himself, as he banged the door of the elevator
shut. He pressed the button of his floor. The greatness and the power
of the beginning. Peasants struggling and dying, throwing down to
us, here, today, the brightness, the thread, the torch of human free–
dom. He would chase it off, or better still banish it into a footnote,
the image of the man with the salt-bags. Historians should be older,
more stable. He pushed the elevator door open and fumbled for the
key, putting the groceries down in the hallway. He let himself in and
stacked the food on the kitchen table carefully, then undressed. Slip–
ping into a smoking jacket he felt the pockets and took out a cigarette.
He lit it and sat down in the big chair, the one nearest his large
bookcase. He inhaled and cupped his lips to let the smoke out slowly.
Over a year he had spent in seminar work, studying them carefully,
Marx and Spengler. From one pole to another, austere and gloomy
as they struggled in their own darkness, still they had shown to him
that the man with the empty salt-bags had not been left in shadows,
as the memory of the vacant lot. He, Auerbach, had to lose this, the
fantasy of projection.
After all, what was it? Crane had given him the best explanation
of it once in
his
office, words chosen steadily, slowly. "It's merely,
Auerbach, a stage that comes to every historian, especially a young
one. You reach a certain point in knowledge where you're able to
almost live in the period, it's at your fingertips. Almost able to enter
it. But something more is required. That's the moment that you must
push on, where the going is smooth on the surface, but it gives beneath
your feet." He had reminded Auerbach of what Tawney had written
once.
He put the coffee up to boil, cut a slice of the fruit cake and
took it back to the chair. Wisely he had shaped them, Crane, repeated
the words of Tawney with a hushed voice. The certainty of one age
is the problem of another. Auerbach stuffed his mouth with the fruit
cake, picking it from the plate with his fingers. The certainty of one
