Ben Caxton’s Flight from and Return to the Nest

Ben Caxton’s Flight from and Return to the Nest is a small but decisive reversal: after fleeing the Nest in disgust at a scene of uninhibited intimacy, Ben is forced by Jubal Harshaw to confront the inconsistency between his moral outrage and his own earlier acceptance of the Nest’s customs. His departure is immediate and bodily; his return begins not with an explanation but with a wire transfer and a delayed message announcing that he is studying Martian and hopscotch.

The Scene That Drives Ben Away

Ben later tells Jubal that by the morning in question he had partly persuaded himself that life in the Nest was all right. Its oddities had begun to seem almost cheerful, and Mike’s new personality held him: Ben found him cocky and too much like a supersalesman, yet compelling. That tentative acceptance breaks when Ben turns away from the room and then looks back. In the brief interval, Mike and another person have removed their clothes and begun having sex openly, while Ben and several others remain present. Ben compares their boldness to monkeys at a zoo and says the sight nearly made him lose his breakfast.

The shock is not merely a disagreement about sexual manners. Ben says the people involved included Duke and Mike, Jill, and Mike’s other victims, and he presents his alarm as concern for all of them. His reaction, however, is immediate rather than deliberative: he leaves the room and the Nest without retrieving his bag or stopping to explain himself. He gathers his clothes and shoes, ignores a sign on the door, and takes the bounce tube. He says he left so fast that he nearly killed himself. The abandoned bag and abrupt exit make his revulsion visible as action: the place he had begun to find jolly becomes somewhere he cannot remain.

Jubal’s Challenge

Jubal refuses to accept Ben’s disgust as a self-sufficient moral judgment. He argues that Ben had encountered customs unlike his own from the beginning, but stayed, enjoyed the favors of one of the women, and behaved as though he had learned and accepted the situation. In Jubal’s account, Mike treated Ben as a water brother and trusted him; the offense was Ben’s hypocrisy in accepting intimacy while condemning others for acting by the same permissive code. Jubal even allows that Mike’s unquestioning trust may be a weakness, rooted in his early training, but insists that Mike behaved properly by the standards Ben had tacitly accepted.

Ben answers that Jubal has twisted the matter and says that he had to leave because he was about to vomit on the rug. Jubal treats that as a reflex, not a complete defense: Ben could, he says, have kept his jaws shut, walked to the bathroom, and returned with an acceptable excuse instead of bolting for the street door. Ben insists that leaving was necessary. Their dispute therefore turns on more than whether the scene offended him. Jubal asks whether Ben’s disgust excuses his refusal to handle the situation with the consideration and restraint he expects from other people.

Jubal sharpens that criticism by invoking Jill. Ben claims to love her, yet, in Jubal’s view, has not given her even a tenth of the effort she made to help him when he was kidnapped. He has spent more moral energy objecting to the young people’s friendly sex than asking what threatens them. Jubal connects that indifference to the danger facing the group with a warning about the persecution of religious dissent: Christ, he says, was crucified for preaching without a police permit. The comparison shifts the argument from private manners to public vulnerability. Ben’s departure has not removed him from the consequences of what is happening at the Nest.

Departure, Money, and Return

When Jubal tells him to think it over, Ben stands and says that he is leaving. Jubal answers that he can go after lunch; Ben insists on going now. The exchange repeats the urgency of his original flight, but this time his departure follows an explicit confrontation. The narrative does not show an immediate reconciliation or explain Ben’s thoughts during the journey. Instead, it measures the change through what he does next.

Twenty-four hours later, Ben wires Jubal two thousand dollars. The transfer is a concrete act of renewed connection after the abrupt exit: he has gone, but he has not simply cut himself off from Jubal or the people under discussion. A week passes without another message. Jubal then sends a brief inquiry to Ben’s office, asking what he is doing. Ben’s delayed reply says that he is studying Martian and the rules for hopscotch, and closes with a fraternal sign-off. The shift from flight to study suggests that Ben has chosen to approach the unfamiliar community through learning rather than continue to reject it from outside.

Significance of the Reversal

The episode gives Ben’s return a deliberately modest form. There is no narrated scene of his re-entry into the Nest, no public declaration that he has changed his mind, and no account of what the two thousand dollars are meant to fund. What the text does supply is a sequence of choices: he bolts when confronted with a custom he cannot stomach; he argues with Jubal rather than simply dismissing him; he sends money the next day; and, after a week, identifies his current work as studying Martian and hopscotch. The final message makes return an unfinished practice, not a triumphant announcement.

That practice matters because Ben’s departure exposed a conflict between his claim to care and the limits of his tolerance. Jubal’s rebuke ties that conflict to Ben’s relationship with Jill and to the danger faced by the Nest, while Ben’s later actions answer without resolving every accusation. The sudden exit and the patient study stand in contrast: one is a bodily refusal to remain in an uncomfortable room, the other an effort to learn the rules of a world he had judged too quickly. The result is a turning point in Ben’s relation to the Nest, and a transition from recoil toward renewed, if still unelaborated, participation.