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Title: My dear Cornelia
Author: Stuart P. Sherman
Release Date: June 26, 2023 [eBook #71050]
Language: English
Credits: Bob Taylor, hekula03 and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from
images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY DEAR CORNELIA ***
Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
MY DEAR CORNELIA
_My dear Cornelia_
BY
STUART P. SHERMAN
[Illustration: Decoration]
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
BOSTON
COPYRIGHT 1924 BY STUART P. SHERMAN
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_My dear Cornelia:_
_You and I have discovered many little differences of opinion; but
we have always had so much in common, so many tastes and quite
elementary convictions, that, years and years ago, I tried to
persuade you that we ought to take a stand together. On that point we
failed to reach an agreement; and which of us was right is a question
that you have never since been willing to debate with me._
_There is another point, however, which I have long desired to
discuss with you: that is our common liking for dedicated things. I
wish to dedicate this little book to you—my share in it. The task
embarrasses me; for, wherever in these pages I find anything that
seems to me blithe or charming or wise, instantly I recognize that
it is not mine but yours. Here then, in justice, I restore to you
these feebly recorded memories of our walks and talks in sunlight and
moonlight._
_While I am confessing, I will tell you what perhaps I haven’t
mentioned before, that it was Mr. M. A. De Wolfe Howe who urged me
to draw you into our conversation on religion. And I really ought to
mention Mr. Ellery Sedgwick; but, the fact is, I have been just a
bit jealous of him since he sent that telegram—I showed it to you,
did I not?—shortly after he made your acquaintance, saying, “I am
desperately in love with Cornelia.”_
_Of course I don’t mind your being admired, afar off, by anyone who
pleases, no matter how dangerous he may be at close range; but this
page, you must understand, exists only to record that I am_
_Ever faithfully yours,
S._
_Santo Espiritu, Midsummer, 1924_
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE: CHALLENGING THE IDEA OF CHASTITY
PAGE
I. WE DISCUSS THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF PARENTS AND CRITICS 3
II. I MEDITATE, IN FRONT OF A BOOKCASE, ON SCOTT, JANE AUSTEN,
CHARLOTTE BRONTË, AND THE GOOD VICTORIANS 17
III. H. G. WELLS, GALSWORTHY, MAY SINCLAIR, J. D. BERESFORD 27
IV. SEVEN REASONS FOR MR. HERGESHEIMER, D. H. LAWRENCE, AND THE
EMETIC SCHOOL 35
V. WE DISCUSS MARRIAGE AND THE HOPE OF THE YOUNGER GENERATION 48
BOOK TWO: AN ELIGIBLE YOUNG MAN
I. CORNELIA’S CHILDREN REACT TO A SUITABLE MATCH 61
II. “LET’S WALK” 67
III. PREREQUISITES OF A DECENT MARRIAGE 73
IV. CORNELIA APPRECIATES HER HUSBAND 80
V. WE DISCUSS THE INNER LIFE 86
VI. A THEORY OF HAPPINESS 91
VII. THE REAL THING 97
BOOK THREE: TREATING OF MODERN GIRLS
I. THE EDUCATION OF DAUGHTERS 103
II. FLAGS OF REVOLT 118
III. BLOOM 120
IV. CAREERS FOR WOMEN 129
BOOK FOUR: CORNELIA AND DIONYSUS
I. ENNUI IN THE PROVINCES 139
II. NEW YEAR’S EVE IN NEW YORK 150
III. HIS EXCELLENCY ON ECONOMIC NECESSITY 162
IV. VERNON WILLYS ON BACCHIC ECSTASY 171
V. I EXPLAIN THE POSITION OF CÆSAR’S WIVES 184
VI. I DISCUSS THE ETHICS OF AN AUTOMOBILING CIVILIZATION 203
VII. THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS 211
BOOK FIVE: APPROACHING RELIGION AND OTHER GRAVE MATTERS
I. WE MEET IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 223
II. OLIVER JUNIOR DISCUSSES HIS PARENTS, THEIR RELIGION, AND
HIS OWN 230
III. TABLE TALK AT SANTO ESPIRITU 245
IV. A SILENCE BY THE SEA 253
V. CORNELIA’S RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 267
BOOK ONE
CHALLENGING THE IDEA OF CHASTITY
I
WE DISCUSS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PARENTS AND CRITICS
When I am in doubt, I talk with Cornelia; and while I am with her, my
uncertainties disappear. But this subject she herself broached, at
her home in one of those paradises of wood and water where Americans
of her class have learned to hide their lives—for the summer.
She is a young woman of forty-five, with what Hazlitt somewhere calls
a “coronet face,” finely cut and proudly borne, and it gives one a
feeling of distinction merely to be in her presence. My memory holds
like a piece of radiant sculpture the image that she left there at
her wedding, twenty years ago, when she turned at the altar after
the episcopal benediction and paced down the aisle, clear-eyed and
fearless, to the thunder of organ music: it seemed to me then that
the young chevalier of the diplomatic service on whose arm her hand
had alighted was leading the Samothracian Victory into the holy state
of matrimony. It was an excellent alliance, with high sanctions and
distinguished witnesses, auspiciously begun and with a constantly
felicitous continuation. She has walked ever since, so her friends
declare, between purple ribbons: her ways have gone smoothly and
well in delectable regions far above the level of the rank-scented
multitude.
When one talks with her, her hands lie still in her lap. She does
not think with her hands, nor does any other emphasis of her body
intrude its comment upon the serene and assured movements of her
intelligence. So remote she seems from the ignominious and infamous
aspects of existence, that one wonders how she becomes aware of them.
Yet such unpleasant things, verminous or reptilian, as creep within
range of her vision she inspects sharply and with intrepidity; for
she knows precisely how to deal with them.
As I sat there, blissfully receiving a sense of the security and
perfection which emanate from her, it just flickered into my
consciousness that, if a mouse could have entered that impeccably
ordered room, she would not for a moment have been at a loss. She
would quietly have summoned a maid. Then she would have said: “There
is a mouse in the room. Take it out.” She likes everything to be
right; and she knows so absolutely what is right, that any shade of
uncertainty in conversation with her seems a kind of baseness and
disloyalty. Yet, as much as a superior being can be troubled, she was
troubled about the state of current fiction. She was troubled in that
high and spirited sense of responsibility which certain fine women
feel for the tone of the Republic.
“You have shown,” she said, “some understanding of the immense
influence exerted by literature upon the minds of our young people.
But your discussion of ‘unprintable’ books is up in the air. You must
meet peril definitely, perilously, or your readers won’t even believe
that it exists. In a prairie fire, you must fight with fire; water,
the flames snuff up like a perfume, and sweep on. You don’t come to
grips with the facts. You asperse them with rosewater.”
“You mean,” I replied, fencing feebly, “that I did not furnish a
guide to those new books which no young person should read? I had
thought that would rather please you. The suppressive societies will
supply the information which I omitted. I am not specially interested
in the circulation of any questionable books—except my own.”
“Your innuendo is nasty and your tone is flippant,” she said. I bowed
in acknowledgment of my entire agreement. “But the subject,” she
continued, “is grave. It is very grave to those of us who have boys
and girls of eighteen and twenty. We wish them in these formative
years to be subject only to the finest influences. How can they be,
when they read such books? How can any one who is interested in
moulding the characters of the younger generation not desire to keep
such books as you know they are reading out of their hands? When I
think of my son or my daughter, with their clean sweet young minds,
wading into the filth of our popular fiction, I repeat to myself
those lines of Heine—you remember:—
‘Mir ist, als ob ich die Hände
Aufs Haupt dir legen sollt,
Betend dass Gott dich erhalte
So rein und schön und hold.’”
“Try it,” I suggested with studious brutality. “Call in the children.
Lay your hands on their heads, and pray that God may keep them
in their beauty and purity and sweetness. How will they take it?
Demurely, I fancy—while they are in your presence. But when they
meet in the garden afterward, they will exclaim, ‘Isn’t mother an
old dear!’ And then they will laugh softly, and think of—all sorts
of things. Heine’s prayer, you know, doesn’t hit off the aspirations
of contemporary youth. Beauty is still ‘all right.’ But the quality
of ‘sweetness,’ though it is not yet wholly unmarketable, is held in
greatly diminished esteem. And as for purity—‘What is purity?’ asks
the jesting younger generation, and will not stay for an answer.”
“Young people ask many foolish questions,” said Cornelia
dismissively. “What troubles me is rather the changing attitude of so
many parents and teachers. Have they lost that beautiful desire to
shield the years of innocence? Have they quite lost their sense of
responsibility?”
“No,” I conjectured, “they haven’t altogether lost their sense of
responsibility. But they haven’t known quite what to do with it;
and just now it seems temporarily to have slipped from their hands.
They didn’t know how to use it when they had it; or they were afraid
to use it, and cast the responsibility for the innocence of their
children upon God; and now the children, sick of that evasion, are
acting for themselves. And I am afraid that we have rather lost
contact with the younger generation. It has experienced so much, it
has read so much, it is so accustomed to the free discussion of all
sorts of topics which we thought ominous even to mention—that I often
suspect we have more to learn from it than it has to learn from us.”
“That is a false and vicious humility.”
“No, I assure you, very genuine, however vicious. It came over me
in the spring several years ago in a vision. I happened one day to
observe in my garden a large white cat stalking with soft experienced
tread under the lilacs, on the lookout for young robins making their
trial flight. Being of a somewhat analogical turn of mind, and having
then a high conceit of the wisdom of our generation, I said to
myself: ‘The garden is a symbol of the world. The wise cat is the old
professor. The fledgling robin is the young student.’ As I murmured
the last word, the white cat made a flying leap for the nestling. It
proved to be, however, an adult wren, pert and elusive, which hopped
just one spray higher and twittered derision. The cat walked off
crestfallen, muttering: ‘Such wise birds! I have never known a season
when birds were wise so young.’”
“Well?”
“Well, I really trust these ‘wise birds’ nowadays much further than
you do.”
“Won’t you explain why?” said Cornelia.
“Let me tell you another story. At a neighborhood party recently,
where there was dancing, and the very youngest generation was
present, I was greatly flattered by receiving from Adelaide, a young
lady of five years, marked attentions which on previous occasions had
been directed to Bertram, a far more plausible person than I in all
respects, and, moreover, only thrice the age of Adelaide. I said, ‘I
thought you were devoted to Bertram.’ Instantly she replied: ‘I was.
But I am not interested in Bertram any longer. I know all about him.’
At the age of five, don’t you see, she has already begun to ‘sip the
foam of many lives.’ I happened to be, shall I say, the coca-cola of
the evening. But I know that I shall be sipped and discarded. Already
Adelaide has become critical, fastidious, wary; she will not for long
be taken in.”
“Well?” again from Cornelia, with a hint of irritation.
“I mean to insist,” I explained cautiously, “that such
sentimentalists as you and I seldom do justice to the hard,
clear-eyed maturity—of a sort—which our young people have attained by
pooh-poohing our sentimentality and subjectivity and adopting what
Santayana calls a simple ‘animal faith’ in the material surfaces of
things.”
“Just what do you mean?” Cornelia inquired,—sharply and
scornfully,—“by ‘hard, clear-eyed maturity’? I have no such feeling
about my own children. My own son and daughter are being brought
up as I was brought up. Well-bred young people to-day differ in no
essential respect from well-bred people twenty years ago. What some
idiots try to make us believe is a change of standards is not a
change of standards. It is merely a horrid confusion, due to the fact
that a great many ill-bred people are expressing themselves.”
“That in itself,” I said, “implies a change in conditions, if not
in standards. There is, as you say, a ‘horrid confusion.’ The
confusion is due to the fact that the well-bred young people are now
applauding the ill-bred old people. That is really significant. When
the well-bred young people begin to desert, it is all up with the
Old Guard. That indicates either a revolt or a revolution. You must
remember, Cornelia, that one half of history is an account of the
struggle made by your class to keep the rest out; and the other half
of history is an account of how the rest are getting in. If you are
now in the presence of a revolt by a weak body of outsiders, you may
still effectively oppose it. But if it is a revolution including
your own household, you had better prepare to support the best
elements in the _de facto_ government—in the literary no less than in
the political republic.”
“There are no best elements,” Cornelia retorted, “in what you call
the _de facto_ government. There are no good elements. There are no
decent elements. It is an insurrection of hoodlum and bedlam. It is
all vile. The situation,” she continued, with the clear precision
of a cookie-cutter, “demands drastic action. You, instead of
strengthening the hands of those who attempt to act, amuse yourself
with philosophical futilities, and virtually throw the weight of your
levity against all action.”
“Suppose I desire an antecedent action of the mind?”
“But you are so ambiguous that you have no force. One can’t really
tell on which side you are.”
“I should like,” I hurriedly replied, “to be on the side of the
angels. You know that I should like to be on your side. If I am ever
driven from your side, it will be by the fine high-bred incuriosity
of angels. It will be by the applause of angels, accompanied by some
fresh demonstration of their immitigable hostility to thought.”
“You are rude.”
“And you—just faintly provoking. I am not sure, Cornelia, that you
quite understand the limits of a writer’s power. I have a friend,
long experienced in a public library, who assures me that critical
articles have no real effect. Readers either agree with them from the
outset and are pleased, or disagree with them from the outset and
are displeased. This, she tells me, is especially true of lawyers,
clergymen, professors, and all nice people. Perhaps that is so. Let
us suppose that it is. Suppose also that I were returning to the
discussion of ‘unprintable’ books. What treatment of the subject
would please _you_? You are a ‘conservative’ of definite convictions,
and you demand drastic action. Exactly what is the situation and what
the appropriate action? Are you prepared to say?”
“Certainly,” she replied. “And I will tell you also the stand which I
believe should be taken by a critic who professes to have the public
welfare at heart.”
“Before you do that,” I interposed, “you must pardon me one more
flippancy. Isn’t it true that people often ‘take a stand’ to watch
something that is going on and that will continue to go on whether
they remain in their ‘stand’ or not?”
“If you mean to ask whether I am a moral futilitarian, I am not.
People of character take a stand in order to prevent obnoxious things
from going on. If the obnoxious things continue to go on in spite of
them, people of character are glad to be left behind, or even to be
trampled underfoot, when that is the only way to make their protest
effective.”
“You speak like yourself, Cornelia,” I said, “and no higher
compliment is possible. Your image interests me. I seem to see an
invading army with leveled spears, and you dauntlessly flinging
yourself upon them. Opposition interests me as long as it is
effective—as long as the opposing breast checks the leveled spears.
Sniping from the housetop at the postman, after the revolution
has actually taken place—in that, there is a kind of unpalatable
futility. But how do you apply your figure to the duty of the critic
in the face of current fiction?”
“I apply it in this way. You yourself have admitted that it would
be very easy to make a list of popular writers who, however varied
their art and method, have running through their work an insistent
preoccupation with sex of quite a different character from its
occasional romantic treatment in the novels that you and I were
brought up on. The heart of the matter is this: the minds of young
people are being gravely affected by a group of writers who, in their
several ways, definitely challenge the idea of chastity. Now, what a
really serious critic should do is to call a halt in the production
and reading of that sort of literature.”
“My dear Cornelia,” I exclaimed,—I always exclaim “My dear” when I am
about to express impatience; it introduces the note of suavity,—“My
dear Cornelia, do you read the magazines? Do you attend church? Do
you see the newspapers? Did you not observe that the form, ‘It is
time to call a halt,’ was first employed on the tenth of August,
1914, by an editor in Oshkosh with reference to the German advance on
Paris? In the following week it was applied by a clergyman of Tulsa,
Oklahoma, with reference to the consumption of chewing-gum in the
United States. Since that time, it has been in continuous employment
by all serious critics, lay and clerical, with reference to the
output of the leading English and American novelists.”
“Well,” she replied, “what if it has? So much the worse for the
leading English and American novelists. If they are all running
amuck, is that any reason why the rest of us should lose our heads?
If the novelists are going definitely wrong at the point which I have
indicated, a critic could not be better employed than in standing at
that point and calling a halt.”
“You assign to criticism,” I said, “a task which appeals but faintly
to the critic—a task like that of a traffic policeman without
authority or power. If I had all the authority in the world, I would
not cry ‘stop’ to the novelists, even to those that I have criticized
most harshly.”
“And why not?”
“Because I learn too much from what they are doing to desire to
dam the stream of information. The realistic novelists to-day
are extraordinarily copious, candid, and illuminating confessors
of private morals. I have, to be sure, been troubled by the fact
that the lives of respectable people are so seldom revealed in
these confessions. I have even allowed myself to wonder faintly
at times whether unwillingness to confess may not be, as our
direful Mid-Western school contends, the chief distinction
between respectable people and the other sort. It is a horrid
doubt, concerning which no one but the novelist betrays much
curiosity or provides much light. And so, for novelists, I wish
freedom to confess, and, for myself, freedom to comment on their
confessions—though, since they have become so desperately confessive,
it seems frequently indelicate to do so. If they are, as you assert,
definitely challenging the idea of chastity, the matter is indeed of
more than merely literary interest. I should like to know whether our
standards are undergoing revolutionary change. Won’t you please go
out and ‘call a halt,’ while I go home and inquire in my own fashion
whether anything is going on; whether the idea of chastity has
actually been challenged; if so, what idea of chastity, why, where,
when, in what manner, and with what results?”
“You are hopeless,” said Cornelia, rising. “I shall ask the Bishop to
make this the subject of one of his Lenten discourses.”
“That will be just the thing,” I rejoined, “to induce profound
reflection in our novelists.”
II
I MEDITATE, IN FRONT OF A BOOKCASE, ON SCOTT, JANE AUSTEN,
CHARLOTTE BRONTË, AND THE GOOD VICTORIANS
When I returned to my study, I dropped into a chair which frequently
invites meditation, before a case containing current fiction. My
eyes glanced swiftly along the rows of Wells, Galsworthy, Bennett,
Beresford, and Walpole, lingering an extra moment on _Ann Veronica_,
_The Dark Flower_, and _The Pretty Lady_; visited with slow
interrogative scrutiny the “colorful” assemblage of Hergesheimer, D.
H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, May Sinclair, W. L. George, James Joyce,
Cabell, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Charles G. Norris, Ben
Hecht, and Waldo Franck; then fluttered to rest upon a half-dozen
miscellaneous recent arrivals—Meredith Nicholson’s _Broken Barriers_,
Mrs. Gerould’s _Conquistador_, Maxwell’s _Spinster of This Parish_,
Willa Cather’s _The Lost Lady_, G. F. Hummel’s _After All_, and _West
of the Water Tower_.
Here, I said to myself, is material enough to prove Cornelia’s case,
if she has a case. Among this company I shall find the challengers,
if there is a challenge. What are they calling in question? The idea
of chastity—whose idea of chastity? Cornelia’s idea, the idea of all
nice people—What is the idea of all nice people regarding chastity?
Look in the Dictionary, the record of good usage—Here it is:
“Innocence of unlawful sexual intercourse.” As a history of usage,
the Dictionary should add in parenthesis: “This is a virtue assumed
to be present in all members of the female sex in good and regular
standing.”
Here we have a simple and definite idea to work upon: Chastity is
a virtue assumed to be present in all members of the female sex in
good and regular standing. Who first gave currency to that idea? Our
friends the Victorians? Oh, no! It is astonishing how many so-called
Victorian ideas, delicate and fragile, can be found thriving in
manlier ages, in old robust books like _Don Juan_ and _Tom Jones_,
and in the drama of that “den of lions,” the Renaissance. How they
valued this virtue—those “lions” of the Renaissance! How they
valued this virtue in their wives! What praise they had for its
possessors—“chaste as the icicle that’s curded by the frost from
purest snow and hangs on Dian’s temple”! Shakespeare valiantly
assumed the presence of that virtue in all members of the female sex
in good and regular standing—except Cleopatra.
But we must not be too historical. The idea of chastity exists
full-blown in Goldsmith, in those two famous stanzas which inquire
what happens when lovely woman stoops to “folly” and learns too late
that men “betray,” that is, fail to legalize the “folly.” We remember
what follows, for the lines were in every anthology employed in our
formative period to give to our young minds a relish for virtue and
a lively apprehension of the consequences of departing from it.
Cornelia still thinks we should prescribe Goldsmith rather than Mr.
Galsworthy for the collateral reading of her daughter. Goldsmith
declares very firmly that when lovely woman stoops to folly, no art
can wash her guilt away.
The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover,
And wring his bosom—is to die.
Several distinct elements appear in our fully developed idea: first,
chastity is the virtue of a legal status; second, women are naturally
law-abiding; third, if they lose their status, it is by the natural
perfidy of predatory man; fourth, the disaster is irretrievable.
There is no salvation for the woman but death, the cloister, exile,
or, occasionally, a shamefaced return to “chastity” under the
horsewhip or at point of the pistol.
This idea flourished in the “good old” novels of Sir Walter Scott;
it is fairly well illustrated in the case of Effie Deans in _The
Heart of Midlothian_. Scott was a romancer. His contemporary, Jane
Austen, was a realist. She was far less chivalrously certain than he
that lovely women who are neglectful of legal status are by nature
virtuous. She looked at them hard; she inclined strongly to believe
that such women are by nature vain, sentimental, and ignorant—like
Lydia Bennett in _Pride and Prejudice_. But Jane Austen is at one
with Scott in treating unlawful passion austerely. In the fiction of
both these worthies the erring woman is unmistakably a “victim”; the
man, however plausible his manners, is a profligate and unprincipled,
if not a designing, villain; the consequences of departure from
legal status are depicted in strongly deterrent colors. Our idea of
chastity is fortified by them.
Now let us advance a generation or so and question our friends the
Victorians: do they accept our idea and loyally enforce it? Yes—now
and then. Familiar cases? There is the case of little Em’ly in _David
Copperfield_. She is the typical victim of the typical seducer;
and Dickens punishes them both in approved traditional fashion. He
drowns the wicked lover—which is, of course, a logical consequence
of departure from legal status. He sends the victim with her “soft
sorrowful blue eyes” to Australia, where she attempts to expiate
her guilt by a life of self-sacrifice. She has many a good offer of
marriage; “‘But, uncle,’ she says to me, ‘that’s gone for ever.’”
Here we have the doctrine of the irretrievable. That doctrine is
sternly proclaimed by George Eliot in the graver case of Hetty Sorrel
in _Adam Bede_. The repentant lover tries to do something for Hetty.
His last words are that it is no use: “You told me the truth when
you said to me once, ‘There’s a sort of wrong that can never be made
up for.’” Neither Scott nor Jane Austen could have handled these
elementary cases in a more strictly orthodox fashion. Our idea is
again fortified.
But the great Victorian novelists pushed their speculations beyond
the elementary problems raised by the victim-villain situation. They
had, several of them, personal reasons for reflecting thoughtfully
upon the social utility of the stout bulwarks with which the English
law attempted to fortify the idea of chastity and the related
doctrine of the irretrievable. Dickens is said to have fallen in
love with all the Hogarth daughters and to have married the wrong
one. Thackeray married at twenty-five a woman who half a dozen
years later became insane and who outlived him. Bulwer-Lytton was
legally separated at twenty-three from a woman who outlived him.
Meredith’s _Modern Love_ discusses an incompatibility of temper
from which a death divorced him. And George Eliot, high priestess
of Victorian morality, was actually living in a kind of solemn and
almost officious virtue with another woman’s husband. These were
circumstances arranged to liberate speculation and to set it playing
a little skeptically about the one way out—the sole dark exit which
Goldsmith had so glibly offered to lovely women who are unfortunate
in love.
In a novel of the mid-nineteenth century, which used to be thought
very dangerous reading,—_Jane Eyre_,—Charlotte Brontë considered one
of these more difficult cases, and almost presented it. Jane, an
eager, self-reliant, self-supporting, and fairly hard-headed young
woman, first of our modern heroines, is loved with a grand passion
by Rochester, who is enchained by marriage to a hopeless lunatic.
Now the novelist permits Jane to fall deeply in love with Rochester,
thus perilously illustrating the possibility that a truly great and
two-sided passion may come into existence outside legal status.
Charlotte Brontë, however, intervened twice to save the situation.
She wasn’t fastidious about the chastity of Rochester: chastity is
a female virtue. But she was fastidious about the chastity of Jane.
And so, of course, she makes Jane ignorant at first of the fact that
Rochester is married; and she makes Jane tell him that it is all up,
when she learns that he is married. That was the perfectly correct
thing for Jane to do.
But it created a dilemma. Charlotte Brontë knew that it created a
dilemma—a dilemma with unchastity for one horn and the frustration
of a grand passion for the other. (It should perhaps be explained
that a grand passion, in those illiberal days, was thought of as an
experience that befell a girl but once in a lifetime.) Charlotte
Brontë did not quite dare to treat this dilemma. She faced it for
a moment. She let her readers face it for a moment. Then she
intervened again: she destroyed the dilemma. She made it all come
right. She restored both hero and heroine to chastity by pitching the
lunatic wife headlong into the flames of the house of Rochester.
A happy thought—so it must have seemed to the author. Yet, as one
reflects upon it, this solution appears a little dangerous. To pitch
a superfluous wife into the flames—well, it would not quite serve
as a Kantian basis for the solution of all such problems. Under the
English law, the dilemma reasserted its actuality. _Jane Eyre_ stands
there early in the Victorian Age as a challenge, rather evasively
presented, to the idea of chastity. In W. B. Maxwell’s _Spinster of
This Parish_, 1923, a modern heroine is placed in almost precisely
Jane’s situation, except that her lover does not think it necessary
to lie to her about his lunatic wife. Without a moment’s hesitation,
she accepts the grand passion. Since she accepts it with all the
fortitude and fidelity of an old-fashioned wife, she seems to-day a
quite safe, old-fashioned character; and it is hard to conceive of
any one’s thinking of her as “unchaste.”
Other Victorians, usually with much circumspection, returned to the
dilemma; and they returned to it in such numbers that to challenge
the idea of chastity as a legal creation may be regarded as a rather
distinctively Victorian contribution. From the question what to do
when you are united to an undivorceable insane wife, the Victorians
proceeded cautiously to consider the demands of virtue in analogous
sets of circumstances. What is the point at which the maintenance
of legal chastity involves the loss of ethical integrity? What is
right conduct for a young girl whose parents or relatives have united
her in a “suitable marriage” to a repellent brute of means and
good family? That is a question which interested Thackeray in _The
Newcomes_; and it will be remembered that the wife of Barnes Newcome
answers the question in her own case by giving her husband occasion
for divorce under the English law. It is not always observed that to
Hester Prynne in _The Scarlet Letter_ right conduct, to the last page
of the book, consists in fidelity to her lover, not to her fanatical
husband; and Hawthorne, perhaps indecently, places the lovers in
adjacent graves of a Boston burying-ground. Isabel Archer, in Henry
James’s _Portrait of a Lady_, is begged by her lover to desert her
husband and come to him, and to disregard the “bottomless idiocy”
of what other people will think or say about them. Though, on the
last page, Isabel is still clinging to legality, one is left in some
doubt whether she will cling indefinitely. Meredith’s Diana is a
standing challenge to the doctrine of irretrievable marriage. Hardy’s
Tess is a defiance to the idea of chastity entertained by the Angel
Clares; and the obscene relation in _Jude the Obscure_ is obviously
that between him and his wife, not that between him and Sue, except
as it is smirched by his return to his wife and by her return to her
husband.
But why multiply instances? Here are enough to show that the good
Victorians repeatedly solicited our sympathy and our support for
heroines whose ethical integrity was afflicted by their legal
chastity. The idea of illicit love as an affair of victim and
villain, has been largely jettisoned or given over to melodrama, as
of an interest too primitive or too banal for extended consideration.
To their successors, the Victorian realists bequeath, as matter of
far higher artistic and general human concern, their rather cautious
essays upon the evaded dilemma of _Jane Eyre_.
III
H. G. WELLS, GALSWORTHY, MAY SINCLAIR, J. D. BERESFORD
Let us now enter fearfully upon the burning ground of contemporary
fiction. The territory is immense, and unexplorable here in detail.
All that one can do is to stand upon the smoky borderland, and
comment briefly upon some conspicuous spots in the conflagrant area
and upon the general direction of the wind.
One cannot, on every occasion for mentioning him, reread the entire
works of Mr. Wells. I retain a strong impression that most of his
novels of contemporary life challenge the idea of indissoluble
marriage. In this respect Mr. Wells is no innovator. I retain
also the impression that one tends to derive from these novels
a conviction that everyone’s first marriage is a mistake. This
indicates the direction of the wind. Now Mr. Wells is a long way from
accepting Goldsmith’s idea that death is the only way out of a bad
situation. He has no patience with the doctrine of irretrievability.
But as long as unlawful relations furnish the only available
alternative way out, his works naturally disquiet Cornelia, and
challenge her idea of chastity.
His works disquiet me, because I think the defect which his heroes
and heroines find in their first marriage they will find also in
their second, and their third, and their fourth; they will find that
neither the second nor the third nor the fourth marriage is capable
of sustaining indefinitely the sense of ecstasy which the tired
business man experiences the first time he notices how pretty his
stenographer is. Tedium is three fourths of life. Sensible men settle
quietly down to endure it, sustained by their fortitude and their
twenty-five per cent of creature comforts and incidentals. The others
imagine that by Babbittian adventures they can change the proportions
and get something better than tedium. There is nothing that is even
“just as good.” Thackeray knew this and admitted it. Mr. Wells hasn’t
admitted it. That constitutes one distinction between the author of
_The Newcomes_ and the author of _The New Machiavelli_.
Mr. Galsworthy told us in _The Dark Flower_ about the quest of
ecstasy, and in _Saint’s Progress_ he confessed something of the
extraordinary disregard of legality in sexual relations on the part
of well-bred young people, occasioned in part by the stresses of
the war. Mr. Galsworthy, like Mr. Wells, inclines to make ecstasy
rather than legality the test of right relations between men and
women, though I think most of his heroes and heroines are somewhat
less incorrigibly expectant than those of Mr. Wells. In _The Forsyte
Saga_, his prime achievement and a rich and various and notable
work, he makes his most significant study of that Victorian dilemma
upon which _Jane Eyre_ was so nearly impaled. In the case of Soames
Forsyte and Irene and Jolyon, he brings, with great circumstantiality
and seriousness, a fine woman face to face with the choice of
illegal status or the substantial frustration of life; and Irene
unequivocally accepts the illegal status. The entire treatment of
the theme indicates, I think, Mr. Galsworthy’s belief that she
was ethically justified, as she was also justified by the general
consequences, in her union with Jolyon. The one high crime in the
book, as Mr. Galsworthy conceives it, is Soames Forsyte’s exaction of
marital rights from a wife who is in love with another man.
I wonder whether Cornelia has read _The Forsyte Saga_. I wonder
whether, if she should enter imaginatively into the circumstances,
she would not consider Soames’s act a crime. If so, she would
challenge the idea of chastity. Perhaps she would call the act “a
heinous unchastity”; but that would be to abandon our definition.
I was a bit shocked last spring when someone remarked that May
Sinclair had joined the ranks of those who are writing primarily to
engage the attention of Mr. Sumner; and that _Ann Severn and the
Fieldings_ is an “immoral book.” I recalled her _Divine Fire_ as
one of the keen delights of twenty years ago, and I remembered her
recently published _Mr. Waddington of Wyck_ as the most exhilarating
and remorseless flaying alive of the philanderer that I had ever
witnessed.
I read _Ann Severn and the Fieldings_, and I found it, especially
in its last two or three chapters, a love story of poignant and
thrilling beauty. Compared with many of the physiologically and
pathologically introspective novels of the day it is, despite
its exhibition of a neurosis resulting in false angina pectoris,
almost an old-fashioned love story. It is almost old-fashioned in
presenting, in the case of Ann, a passion as straight, as single,
as unswerving, as unflinching as that of Shakespeare’s Juliet.
Ann, brought up with the three Fielding brothers, loves one of
them, Jerrold, from childhood till the end, with the “divine fire.”
Jerrold, on leave from the front, intends to ask Ann to be his
wife; but by the connivance of circumstances with the lying of
interested persons, he is persuaded that Ann is living with his
shell-shocked brother. Jerrold, thereupon, in the recklessness of the
hour, expecting to be killed in the next attack, abruptly marries
Maisie. When the conspiracy of lying and ambiguous circumstances is
dispelled, Ann claims Jerrold as her own, and he gives himself to her
“without a scruple.”
Now the ethical points, as exhibited by the author, are these: first,
Jerrold has shown male recklessness regarding his virtue, by marrying
one woman when he loved another; second, he displays an awakened
ethical sensitiveness when he rejoices at the termination of his
intimate relations with his wife; third, Ann has never for an instant
swerved from her virtue; Maisie proves her virtue in the beautiful,
if impossible, scene in which she surrenders her husband to Ann,
saying: “I can’t think of anything more disgusting than to keep a man
tied to you when he cares for somebody else. I should feel as if I
were living in sin.” Of course the major contention is, that Ann,
though without legal status, was “chaste”; but that is a paradox and
a challenge to our idea.
Let us take one more case in this group: Mr. J. D. Beresford with
the Jacob Stahl trilogy. In this rather drab yet impressive work,
one finds the “emancipative” ideas of Mr. Wells assimilated by a
much less buoyant nature. Jacob muddles into a bad marriage with an
unquestionably unsuitable person, from whom he separates, though he
is not divorced. He falls in love with one of the keepers of his
lodging-house and asks her to live with him without legal sanction
till his wife shall die. After months of consideration she freely and
resolutely joins him. From that point, Mr. Beresford exerts himself
to prove that their relation is just as grave and permanent and full
of labor and anxiety and humdrum and gray days as marriage itself.
I suspect there is a kind of grim truthfulness in the relation of
this adventure. It reminds one, in the third volume, of George Eliot
and of accounts given by sundry visitors of the slightly dreary
decorum of her ménage. There is no expectation of ecstasy on the part
of either of the adventurers. They merely look, outside marriage,
for the alleviations of the ultimate human solitude afforded by a
satisfactory marriage. They are tolerably successful. But when
the death of Stahl’s wife clears the way, they return, for various
reasons of expediency, to a legal status.
Mr. Wells, Mr. Galsworthy, May Sinclair, and Mr. Beresford are all,
I think, seriously interested in morality. On the whole, their
work does not contemptuously and explicitly challenge the idea of
monogamous marriage. At least, it does not flout the possibility of
arriving, by freedom of readjustment, at some reasonably satisfactory
and permanent relationship between one man and one woman. And
so, in a sense, their point of view begins to appear relatively
conservative. If they could be questioned regarding their moral
purposes or tendencies, they would profess sincere respect for
virtue. But they would add that they are concerned, as novelists,
with reflecting the revision which the idea of virtue is undergoing
in our time. They are generally willing to admit that society and the
state are related in necessary and vital ways to the customary form
of sexual alliance. But they repudiate the notion that mere legality
can set the seal of virtue upon any such alliance. Less firmly, yet
pretty clearly, they repudiate the notion that mere illegality can
remove the seal of virtue which individual adventurers may set upon
their alliance. Because chastity has been traditionally identified
with legality, they hold the word in some contempt; they incline to
discard it as the name of any recognizable virtue. The important
ideas which it has obscured are these: to maintain permanent
relations with one who is thoroughly agreeable to you is virtue; to
maintain permanent relations with one who is thoroughly disagreeable
to you is vice.
There is quite a bit of ground between.
IV
SEVEN REASONS FOR MR. HERGESHEIMER, D. H. LAWRENCE, AND THE EMETIC
SCHOOL
Among the novelists who have arrived within the last ten years, it
is more difficult to discover any community in constructive ethical
intention or tendency. One can no longer feel sure that marriage
is regarded as the normal condition, for which fidelity in illegal
relations is a substitute. One recalls numerous heroines who collect
erotic adventures like female Don Juans, and others who stoutly and
“conscientiously” refuse marriage to lovers to whom they refuse
nothing else. And here is George F. Hummel’s _After All_, advertised
as follows: “Its analysis of the inherent self-destructiveness
of marriage is carried to a conclusion which, however opposed to
accepted standards of morality, has in it the logic and compelling
force of a thinking man’s profoundest conviction.” Here are D. H.
Lawrence’s Lost Girl and Arnold Bennett’s Pretty Lady, and W. L.
George’s Ursula Trent, and Willa Cather’s Lost Lady, and Joseph
Hergesheimer’s Cytherea, and the heroine of Mr. Masters’s _Domesday
Book_—a whole troop of damsels who meander where they will in
quest of rosebuds. Here is Robert Herrick’s Lilla deliberately and
successfully discarding marriage for an unsanctioned union. Here is
Margaret Prescott Montague’s Julie (in _Deep Channel_) finding in an
illicit relationship the effective key to a larger and more spiritual
life. Here is even Mrs. Gerould permitting a grave and thoughtful
illegal relationship to the hero of _Conquistador_, whom she would
apparently have us regard as the very pink of essential purity. No
single explanation will account for the community in “destructive”
tendency discernible in the latest phase of the movement; or for
the fact that there is hardly one in a dozen recent novels which
Cornelia would care to see in the hands of her daughter; or for the
more alarming fact that, if there were one such novel in a dozen,
Cornelia’s daughter probably would not care to read it.
Since, in the United States, marriage has been by no means a legally
irretrievable disaster, it would be absurd to point to the rigor of
our law as a very important occasion of the widespread indifference
or disrespect for chastity exhibited or reflected by many American
writers. The occasions of our revolt lie deeper than that, and many
causes conspire to give to our current fiction its unwonted aspect of
levity and license.
First, as a literary inheritance, the Wells-Galsworthy group of the
elder novelists bequeathed to their successors a profound skepticism
about the legal touchstone of chastity, together with a pleasant rule
of virtue which tends, as a social regulation, to be unworkable,
since it is incapable of objective and public application. Their
“rule,” developed a little, lands one in an anarchical moral
individualism; and their successors developed it by omitting the word
“permanent” from the definition of virtue.
Secondly, the appearance of a good many rather frothily wanton
pictures of frothily wanton younger sets may still be attributed to
reaction from the austerities of war; the writers of the futilitarian
school take chastity lightly because they take everything lightly:
for examples, Mr. Carl Van Vechten and Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald—though
it must be admitted that the latter, in _The Beautiful and Damned_,
has written the most impressive temperance tract of our time. (I
wonder whether Cornelia noticed that it is a temperance tract.)
Thirdly, women are discovering various means of avoiding the
inevitable penalties which the earlier novelists inflicted upon
sorrowful blue-eyed girls who stooped to folly: they don’t, in
fiction at least, so often have to abandon a baby (_Adam Bede_), or
to lose their job (_Esther Waters_), or to be barred from marriage
(_Tess of the Durbervilles_), or to suffer ostracism or exile (_David
Copperfield_).
Fourthly, as in the use of cocktails and tobacco, the double standard
is manifestly giving ground before a single standard, and that a
masculine standard: see any novel of the literary and artistic
“villages” of New York or Chicago—for example, those of Mr. Floyd
Dell. In Meredith Nicholson’s _Broken Barriers_, an extraordinary
disclosure from the Indiana school, unchastity is almost blandly
presented as, for a considerable group of young business women,
something like the accepted avenue to social advancement and as a
preliminary to a good marriage.
Fifthly, chastity, legal and spiritual, has for a dozen years
been under fire in this country as a distinctive aspect of that
“Puritanism” which, as we know, must be destroyed, root and branch,
before we shall have any art, letters, or society that are really
worth mention.
Sixthly, the idea of sex as a sacred mystery, under protection of
Church and State, has given ground before an interesting series of
competing ideas: the idea of sex as a chapter in physiology; the idea
of sex as a social asset and a contribution which every good mixer
makes to the occasion; and the idea of sex as a horrible nuisance.
Seventhly, there is appearing here and there in current literature
evidence of the growth among us of an æsthetic philosophy which
rejects the moral valuations of life. Its doctrine is briefly
this:—You can’t be sure that any act will yield you happiness. You
can’t be sure that any act will be virtuous. You can be sure that
every act will yield you experience. Let us go in for experience,
and value our acts according to the quantity and intensity of the
experience which they yield.
Mr. Hergesheimer at present, I think, best represents the æsthetic
point of view. I am afraid that Mr. Hergesheimer is just a little bit
of a _poseur_. He pretends to feel surprised that many people regard
his books as of immoral tendency. I myself am not one of those who
are much worried by the moral aspects of his work. If he were content
to let the novels speak for themselves, few people would guess how
unorthodox the author is. As a matter of fact Mr. Hergesheimer is
a renegade Presbyterian. He is a Presbyterian turned artist. He is
proud of his apostasy and he likes to talk about it. He has shaken
off his patrimonial “Puritanism”; he finds life more delectable
since; and he delights to find a cool spot in a Havana hotel, and
to stretch out his legs and discourse somewhat expansively, for
the benefit of his fellow citizens north of the Gulf, upon his
“emancipation,” with frequent pointed references to his informal
dinner-jacket of Chinese silk, the orange blossoms in his buttonhole,
the flourished Larrañaga cigar in his fingers, and the frigid mixture
of Ron Bacardi, sugar, and vivid green lime at his elbow.
As an artist, he is interested in two things: first in the luxurious,
the colorful, the exotic; and second, in the poetry of passionate
idealisms, martyr-hot. He himself exhibits a middle-aged prudence
and coolness; he possesses a certain amount of taste of a certain
kind, which preserves him from a certain kind of now popular
grossness; he paints himself as a connoisseur of sensations: these
qualities, together with his old-fashioned romantic attachment to
“grand passions,” give him a salient distinction, indeed real
isolation, among the “Jacksonian rabble” who imagine that Mr.
Hergesheimer is one of them, and who still constitute the main body
of the anti-Puritan movement. Yet, as an artist, he finds himself
constrained to be essentially an anti-moralist. He welcomes all
experience in proportion to its intensity and richness of color.
He cannot help admitting his “preference for girls who have the
courage of their emotions.” He cannot help confessing his artistic
pleasure in observing a crucifix as the background of a prostitute.
He cannot deny himself the revenge upon his Presbyterian ancestors,
which consists in referring to the prostitutes of a house in Havana
as “informal girls,” as if, forsooth, when one emerges from the
ancestral hypocrisies of Presbyterianism, “formality” remains the
only real distinction between these girls and any other sort of girls.
Oh Cornelia—I begin to understand what troubles you!
Mr. D. H. Lawrence seems to have set out with the notion that sex
is the greatest thing in the world, and with the correlative notion
that we can’t very well have too much of it, or have it on too
easy terms. He is still, if I understand him, a great believer in
experience for experience’s sake, and he passes in many quarters for
a dangerous immoralist. To the conventional sense, indeed, he may
easily appear to write his novels as if the world of conventional
morals had no existence. Even in _Sons and Lovers_, his heroes and
heroines explore their sexual good where they find it with barbaric
or _übermenschlich_ indifference to legality—or, should one say,
with the indifference to legality prevalent among a coal-mining
population? In his more recently published _Women in Love_, his
seekers of experience and self-realization are men and women who
have exhausted the possibilities of gratification through any
ordinary intimacy of relationship. The book has offended pudency
by a few intelligible paragraphs of plain speech where we were
formerly accustomed to silence. But its really shocking aspect is
its studious, remorseless revelation of what a horrible, devouring
mania sexual passion may be: how involved with mortal fear; and
with cold, probing curiosity; and with murderous hatred. One of the
characteristic high spots in the story is that in which Hermione
expresses the kind of intimacy that she desires with Birkin, and
consummates her “voluptuous ecstasy” by seizing a beautiful ball
of lapis lazuli and bringing it crashing down upon his head. Except
for a lively incident of this sort here and there, _Women in Love_
must impress the ordinary novel-reader as intolerably dull, dreary,
difficult, and mad: and anyone who declares that it makes sex
attractive should be punished by being required to read it through.
Mr. Lawrence’s interest in it is predominantly the interest of an
exploring moralist who has specialized in sexual relations and is
coming to conclusions which are important, if true. He is coming
to the conclusion that—for men, at any rate—passional surrender is
not the greatest thing in the world. He is coming to the conclusion
that the romantic poets and the romantic novelists—including,
perhaps, Mr. Wells and Mr. Galsworthy—have all been on the wrong
tack in representing as the height of human experience that ecstasy
in which one individuality is merged and absorbed in another. This
he regards as in its essential nature an ideal of decadence. This
is an aspiration toward death and disintegration, from which the
inevitable reaction is disgust. The virtue of a man is to preserve
his own integrity and resist the dissolution of union. “When he
makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his
secret soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair.” I quote this
sentence from Mr. Lawrence’s fantastic and curious _Fantasia of the
Unconscious_. And from his _Studies in Classic American Literature_
I quote these words, calculated to trouble both his enemies and his
friends: “The essential function of art is moral. Not æsthetic, nor
decorative, nor pastime and recreation, but moral. The essential
function of art is moral.” This will perhaps trouble Mr. Hergesheimer
more than it troubles me.
Among the later novelists of the Middle West one might choose either
Sherwood Anderson or Ben Hecht as a striking representative of
the anti-Puritan movement. But there is so much cloudy symbolism
in the author of _Many Marriages_ that one may more expeditiously
indicate the position of the author of _Gargoyles_—and of less
widely circulated works. Mr. Hecht, generally speaking, appears to
be the inheritor of Mr. Dreiser’s moral outfit, during the latter’s
lifetime. He interests me more than Mr. Dreiser ever did, because
his intellectual processes are much more rapid. Mr. Dreiser reaches
his conclusion by a slow, vermiculous emotional approach, like the
promenade of the _lumbricus terrestris_; Mr. Hecht darts at his
like a wasp. He is a stylist, and he feels a kind of ecstasy in the
stabbing use of words. He is a satirist exulting in the stripping of
shams. In _Gargoyles_, he is a cynic with the point of mad King Lear
crying:—
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back.
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whip’st her.
He is an angry and disenchanted moralist. But he is also—and this
is the particularly interesting aspect of his case—an angry and
disenchanted “immoralist.” The emancipated heroes of _Gargoyles_
and _Erik Dorn_ hurl themselves over precipices of experience to
wallow in abysses of spiritual inanity and despair. Yet before
they are emancipated, as Mr. Hecht sees them, they are in an equal
agony of moral chains. Basine, in _Gargoyles_, loathes all women
for his wife’s sake. “His distaste for his wife kept him faithful
to her because his imagination baulked at the idea of embracing
another Henrietta.” Again we are told—almost in the Dreiserian
phraseology—that “cowardice” had made him an excited champion of
domestic felicity, marital fidelity, and kindred ideas.
In his symbolical romance, Mr. Hecht represents man as an agonized
animal, self-crucified on the cross of his moral ideals, martyrizing
himself in behalf of laws and conventions to which his desires and
appetites are in unvanquishable opposition. Hitherto, his satire of
conventional sexual morality has not revealed to me any constructive
element: its caustic and sulphurous bolts leap from an anarchical
darkness of all-embracing disillusion and fathomless disgust.
The note of sexual disgust is, to the student of contemporary morals,
a point of high interest in the recent realistic fiction. This note
of disgust is clamorous in _Blackguard_, by Mr. Hecht’s spiritual
satellite, Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim. It is a steady undertone through
the novels and short stories of Sherwood Anderson; in _The Narrow
House_ and _Narcissus_ of Evelyn Scott; and in the _Rahab_ of Waldo
Franck. It is a cry of diabolic torture in James Joyce’s _Portrait of
the Artist as Young Man_; and in _Ulysses_ it is a rolling ordurous
pandemonium.
In reading the novels of Ben Hecht, Maxwell Bodenheim, Sherwood
Anderson, Evelyn Scott, Waldo Franck, and James Joyce, one’s first
impression is frequently of wonder as to what motive can prompt an
author to perpetuate a record of experience so humiliatingly painful,
and a vision of souls so atrociously ugly. Is the motive revenge upon
life for having taken them in? Is the motive to cleanse the stuffed
bosom of the perilous stuff that preys upon the reason? The mad King
Lear perhaps felt relieved when he had completed his psychoanalysis
of the “simp’ring dame”; but when he had reached his conclusion in
“burning, scalding, stench, consumption,” he cried perforce: “Give
me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination!”
In the Emetic School of fiction appears the _reductio ad nauseam_ of
the idea of sex as a social asset. No lust-bitten monk wrestling with
hallucinations in a mediaæval cloister could have made the entire
subject more bewilderingly detestable than this group of anti-Puritan
and anti-Catholic emancipators, who apparently set out with a desire
to make it pleasant.
V
WE DISCUSS MARRIAGE AND THE HOPE OF THE YOUNGER GENERATION
At this point, as it seemed to me, I had accumulated sufficient
material to enable me to resume my conversation with Cornelia,
without being immediately extinguished by the immense superiority of
her intuitions regarding what is right. Meditating on the evolution
of the idea of chastity from Goldsmith and Scott to James Joyce and
Ben Hecht, I went to see her again.
It was a pleasant midsummer morning, enlivened by a cool breeze
from the lake. I came up through the wood path into the garden, and
found her sitting in the pergola, cool and fresh as the breeze. Her
hands lay still in her lap, clasped upon an open book. Unaware of
my presence, her gaze seemed to have gone dreamingly down the green
slope, to rest in a kind of hovering question above the bright young
animation of the tennis court. As I appeared, she looked up quickly
and said instantly:—
“Sit here, and let me read you these lovely verses of Walter de la
Mare’s.”
“Do,” I replied; and she read with—oh, just a suspicion of a tremor
in her clear smooth voice, these lines:—
Like an old battle, youth is wild
With bugle and spear, and counter-cry,
Fanfare and drummery, yet a child
Dreaming of that sweet chivalry.
The piercing terror cannot see.
He, with a mild and serious eye
Along the azure of the years,
Sees the sweet pomp sweep hurtling by;
But he sees not death’s blood and tears,
Sees not the plunging of the spears.
* * * * *
O, if with such simplicity
Himself take arms and suffer war;
With beams his targe shall gilded be,
Though in the thickening gloom be far
The steadfast light of any star.
Though hoarse War’s eagle on him perch,
Quickened with guilty lightnings—there
It shall in vain for terror search,
Where a child’s eyes beneath bloody hair
Gaze purely through the dingy air.
She closed the book, and we were silent for a moment, in which I felt
within myself curious little surges of sympathy breaking over rocks
of difference. And then she said: “Well?”
“Cornelia,” I answered, “you were right. The idea of chastity has
been challenged, is being challenged, on all sides, in many ways, for
many reasons.”
I made a discreet summary of my discoveries, and concluded: “Current
fiction reflects a condition bordering on anarchy.”
“Couldn’t one know that without making an investigation, without
ploughing through these dreadful books?”
“Perhaps,” I responded; “but, Cornelia, I think you are wrong in an
important respect. I think there has been a real change in standards,
and that even very nice people no longer think just as they used to
think. At least, they no longer say what they used to say, and they
are immeasurably more tolerant of what other people think.”
“Do you imagine,” she persisted, “that this new tolerance indicates
general moral progress? I think it indicates general moral laxity.
Come, let us be definite. At what points precisely do you fancy there
is any advantage to be gained by taking sexual relations away from
the protection of Church and State and committing them to the whims
of individuals?”
“My dear Cornelia,” I protested, “the prevailing theory is not that
Church and State have ‘protected’ sexual relations. The popular
theory is that Church and State have ignored them—or, at least, in
attempting to regulate them, have ignored so many exceptional cases
that the regulations are invalid. For all these cases, the novel has
been a kind of court of last resort. On the whole, I believe that it
has greatly enriched the ideal of virtue by giving a hearing to the
innumerable cases in which legality is the mask of nearly intolerable
conditions.”
“Intolerable conditions,” interrupted Cornelia, “are usually the
result of imprudent marriages, marriages for advantage, marriages
without love. Those who make such marriages should expect to pay the
price. It is sentimentality to discard a good rule to save a few
exceptional individuals. Incompatibility of temper is no harder to
bear than smallpox or anything else that marriage may let one in for.”
“I am explaining how we differ,” I resumed. “I find myself in
pretty full sympathy with the current tendency to revolt against
the doctrine of the irretrievable as applied by Goldsmith and
certain of the Victorians. The earlier Georgian principle that
virtue, in this connection, means to maintain permanent relations
with one who is thoroughly agreeable to you begins to sound to my
ears like orthodoxy, as does also the companion principle, that to
maintain permanent relations with one who is thoroughly disagreeable
to you is vice. And though I am not ready to subscribe to all
the possible corollaries of these two positions, I seem to see,
gradually emerging from them, a new and better idea of chastity—of
clean relationships—which will make “nice” people not less but more
fastidious in their intimacies, not less but more austere in yielding
the citadel of body and spirit.”
“Nothing will emerge from these principles,” said Cornelia
decisively, “without a rule—without a rule which Church and State
can enforce upon people who are not nice. You have admitted that
the Wells-Galsworthy test of successful marriage tends to be
‘unworkable.’ You admit that the word ‘permanent’ tends to drop out
of the principle, and that then you have, instead of a substitute
for law, a permission for anarchy. You even admit that the novelists
already reflect a condition approaching anarchy. Don’t you think,
after all, it is about time to call a halt?”
“No,” I insisted stubbornly; “the movement of indefinite anarchical
expansion halts itself. And I stand by the novelists, even by the
Emetic School, as showing where the movement halts: in blind alleys,
against iron necessities, in miasmic swamps, in ennui, in despair,
in disgust unfathomable. You cannot guess, Cornelia; without years
of such reading as I am happily certain you will never undertake,
you cannot understand what comfort and reassurance I find in the
fathomless disgust exhibited in our most advanced novelists—disgust
for the life that is dedicated to sex. The disgust of the novelists
upholds the splendor of the Church and the majesty of the Law.
Upborne by the disgust of the novelists, like a ship by the briny
behemoth-haunted deep, marriage may yet spread again her proud
full sail for fresh voyages. These novelists reveal obscene things
in their deep-sea caves, but they administer whatever antidote is
required to the obscenity of their speech. They drive home their
moral with an appalling effectiveness beyond the rivalry of critical
comment. They deliver the shattering challenge to unchastity. They
have shown the emancipated moderns capable of dodging all but one
of the consequences which their elders appointed for unchastity;
but they have not shown the moderns capable of dodging the stench
of a disintegrated personality, which fumes in their books like a
last irreducible hell. To safeguard the innocency of your son and
daughter, I incline to believe that one whiff from these caverns
might be as potent as Heine’s prayer. Consciously or not, these
novelists are preparing a counter-revolution.”
“What direction, pray, will that take?” inquired Cornelia, to whom
God has beautifully denied ability to follow such an argument.
“I shall not prophesy in detail,” I said, looking down the slope
towards the tennis court. “Is your contribution to the Younger
Generation in that match?”
“Yes,” she replied, “and isn’t it delightful to see how keen they are
about it?”
“It is. It indicates to me one of the directions of the
counter-revolution. Historians in the future, surveying the monuments
of our children’s time, are going to refer to this as the beginning
of the great age of stadium-building in America. They will see in
this movement a religious significance, not yet visible to us;
and they will expatiate in glowing terms on the period when, with
extravagant and sacrificial adoration of an ideal, our youth exalted
the cleanness and hardness of athletic games, and religiously
subjected themselves to the rules and rigor of the game—to that
arbitrary, elaborate, inflexible, yet self-imposed system of ethics
which alone makes any good game possible. I am hoping that our
children’s generation will contain more real sportsmen than ours
did—fewer quitters, fewer squealers, fewer players crying out to have
the rules changed after the game is on; and no one so silly as to
suppose there can be a game without rules.”
“That hope is rather remote, isn’t it?”
“Rather. I have another, more immediate. I hope that in the early
stages of the counter-revolution our sophisticated sons and daughters
will scrutinize ‘the idea of sex,’ coolly extract from it the part
that belongs to physiology and pathology; and then disuse the word
as synonym for every other element in the complex human relationship
which sometimes makes human beings paradisiacally happy in their
blossoming season and content enough with each other even into
wintry old age. I have some hope that the Emetic School may help our
children to understand that sex and sexual self-realization are not,
in the long view, the main substance of what youth hungers for.”
“Go on!” cried Cornelia, encouragingly.
“I hope that they will make real progress in psychoanalysis. I hope
that, when they feel the ache of the soul’s ultimate solitude and
are restless and full of vague desires they may be capable of lucid
introspection; that they may be frank and plain with themselves, and
call things by their right names, and say to themselves something
like this: ‘I am filled with tedium and passionate craving. I shall
be hard to satisfy, for I am thirsty for a deep draught of human
felicity. What I crave is not described or named in the physiologies.
I crave beauty, sympathy, sweetness, incentive, perfume, difference,
vivacity, wit, cleanness, grace, devotion, caprice, pride, kindness,
blitheness, fortitude. I will not look for these things where I know
they cannot be found, nor under conditions in which I know they
cannot be maintained. But if I find them, and where they thrive,
I shall wish to express my joy by some great act of faith and the
hazard of all I hope to be. And I shall not like the town clerk to
be the sole recorder of my discovery and my faith. I shall wish
witnesses, high witnesses, whatever is august and splendid in the
order of the world, to enwheel me round and bid me welcome to that
order.’ That is the sort of self-realization to which I hope our sons
and daughters are coming.”
Cornelia smiled with a kind of malicious sweetness that she has. She
was satisfied. She rather yearned, I perceived well enough, to remark
that now at last I was taking the “stand” that she had taken from the
first. But Cornelia is one of the few women now living who do not say
everything that they yearn to say. She merely released one arrowy
smile. Then she rose, as I had done already,—standing, she reminds
one of Artemis,—and extending her hand, detained mine with another
deep question. She asked me whether I knew any “living reason” to
believe that my emancipated young people would return to that ideal.
The opportunity was irresistible.
“Yes,” I said, “I have known you, Cornelia.”
BOOK TWO
AN ELIGIBLE YOUNG MAN
I
CORNELIA’S CHILDREN REACT TO A SUITABLE MATCH
There was a wedding at noon in the village church, a couple of miles
from our summer community by the lake, and as most of our colony were
somewhat interested in the girl, we turned out in force. It was an
outwardly festive and—to my sense—agreeably solemn little affair.
There was a bank of lady’s-slippers and maidenhair ferns before
the altar, and the air was heavy with the sweetly mortal scent of
lilies. The clergyman in white vestments had a full consciousness
of the finality of his function. He joined in permanent wedlock a
white, smiling, tearful bride of twenty to a well-dressed groom of
thirty-five, who looked very experienced, very serious, and slightly
bald. Cornelia, who is a connoisseur, whispered to me that it was in
every respect a “most suitable match.” I made a mental note to ask
her at the next opportunity what the essentials of a suitable match
were. I happened, however, to ride away from the ceremony in the rear
seat of her car, sandwiched between her two children, Dorothy and
Oliver Junior; and their comment was less flattering.
“Bah!” exclaimed Oliver. “Let’s go and have a swim. It made me sick.”
“Me too,” said Dorothy. “It made me cold all over to hear her
promising to forsake all others and keep herself only for that
wizened—stick. Why should she forsake all others, just because she is
married? It sounds as if she were going as missionary to the Indians.”
“Or as trained nurse to an isolation hospital,” Oliver suggested.
“When I am married,” said Dorothy, “I shall not forsake all others—at
least, unless I get a better one than that.”
“You are severe critics,” I murmured, secretly delighted to observe
that the children were using the dialect of their feelings, rather
than that polite language which well-bred youth, like Japanese
ladies, employ in presence of their elders. “At what age do you
expect to be married, Dorothy?”
“I shall never marry!” she replied with a deep blush. She is of
course at exactly the correct age for saying that. But if you haven’t
seen her, you can have no adequate notion how dire and how delicious
that threat is on her lips. She inherits “eligibility” from both her
parents. Her mother has a clear, expressive, sunlit loveliness; but
Dorothy’s beauty has in it an element of subtlety—from her father—and
a suggestion of sorcery and peril. She has her mother’s complexion
but her father’s eyes. It is the unexpected combination and contrast
that fascinates one: the filleted blond hair and the fluent roses
of the fair skin, with the brown eyes, dark yet full of lambent
lights—eyes of which the centres seem gleaming paths, leading into
shadows where a man might easily wander and be lost.
“And why won’t you marry?” I pursued; for as we were driving at a
good speed over a rough road, I was sure the watchful maternal ears
could not overhear us. And so was Dorothy.
“Oh, I don’t like the choice,” she said, “that marriage
presents—nowadays.”
“A choice!” I repeated with irreverent levity. “You haven’t come to
that yet, I trust. But what do you think the choice is going to be?”
“You may laugh,” said Dorothy, “but we all know well enough. We don’t
have to wait till we have made it, to know what the choice is. It
is either a ‘good American husband,’ ten or twenty years older than
you, who has a fine position and a character and nice middle-aged
friends, and can give you a home and a social circle and clothes and
things—but hasn’t anything to say to you. He simply hasn’t anything
to say to you.”
“Why do you keep hollering, ‘He hasn’t anything to say to you’?”
mocked her brother. “Who hasn’t anything to say? Who? Who? Who?”
“Shut up!” said Dorothy, with more sweetness than the words can
carry. “You heard. I said, ‘The good American husband has nothing to
say to you.’”
“That is rather a defect,” I assented wickedly, “if you’ve got to be
alone with him for the rest of your life. Yes, it’s a rather serious
defect in a man with whom, forsaking all others, a girl of twenty
expects to spend the next fifty years. But Dorothy, if you don’t take
a good American husband, what is the alternative?”
“Oh, a boy of your own age, of course,” she answered promptly. “A
boy that you like—like in all ways, I mean: like his voice, like his
eyes, like the temperature of his hands—not like fins. He talks with
you about the things that interest you—they are just the same as the
things that interest him; and you like to do things with him; and if
there is anything perfectly splendid, you wish he were there; and
whenever you see him coming, your heart begins to dance.”
“Well,” I said, “that seems an attractive sketch. Why not choose a
boy like that?”
“Because,” she explained, “it seems as if nowadays none of the boys
that one really likes is ever going to amount to much. At any rate,
you must wait till your doddering old age before you can hope to be
married—and what’s the use then? He won’t be interesting to me, and
I won’t be nice for him—then. But we’ll just sit around in padded
chairs, with ear-trumpets in our ears, and yell, ‘Whadye say?’ at
each other; and wish it were bedtime.”
“I don’t quite understand the reason for this postponement.”
“If,” she said, “they are boys of your own age, and enjoy the books
and music that you do, and are nice to dance with, why, then they
think they are going to be poets or composers, and so they don’t
work, and they flunk out of school—and your mother asks you why you
persist in playing around with ‘that worthless fellow’—doesn’t she,
Oliver?”
“Yep!” said her brother, and grinned.
Dorothy, leaning across my knees, first pinched, then patted him,
and said: “Poor old Ollie! He’s nicer than almost any boy I know, and
yet Dad says he’s a ‘worthless fellow,’ too.”
When I suggested that the only hope was to take one of these nice
worthless fellows and put some “starch” into him, the rear seat burst
into a peal of conspirant laughter. Possibly that hope had been
tried. Cornelia whirled around upon us, and demanded:—
“What are you children talking about?”
I answered sedately that we were discussing education for life, and
that there were certain points on which I should like her opinion.
But we were now at the clump of Rural Free Delivery boxes, where
the path comes down from my cottage. Intimating that I might “drop
around” toward the end of the afternoon, I got out, and having
handed up Cornelia’s mail, walked home with my own. It proved rather
piquantly amusing.
II
“LET’S WALK”
There was a light rain at lunch-time, but it blew over, leaving the
out-of-doors extraordinarily inviting. After I had written for two or
three hours, I found myself walking—and chuckling—up the path through
the birches to Cornelia’s place. Under the hemlocks near the house,
I passed Dorothy, in white tennis-attire with a sketchy sweater the
color of California poppies, curled up in a hammock with a book. A
young girl alone fills me with awe, like a cardinal building a nest;
and I always try to slip past without disturbance—I feel that her
mind must be occupied with something beautiful.
“What are you reading?” I called by way of greeting.
“I’m not reading,” she replied, “I’m waiting for the young man that
mother likes to have me play tennis with.”
With an additional chuckle, I proceeded to the front of the house. My
original merriment had been occasioned by two letters, in the morning
mail, from correspondents at large who desired me to inform them
whether Cornelia was “real.” I was also wondering how much of these
letters I could discreetly disclose to her.
She met me on the threshold of the wide verandah, standing for an
instant tiptoe in a practicable yet perfect sylvan costume, and
framed between two tall Chinese vases of wild tiger-lilies, which
made a little pattern with the glints in her hair and the knot of
soft flame at her breast.
“Let’s walk!” she said.
“Let’s,” I replied; and we struck briskly into the abandoned road
which runs, carpeted with bindweed and bittersweet, for miles and
miles skirting the forest, with only a thin curtain of young silver
poplars and birches between it and the lake. Cornelia is a light,
crisp-footed walker,—at her gayest walking, and good for long
distances,—my only complaint being that she has forgotten how to
loiter. She seems rather bent upon reaching the _terminus ad quem_
than careful to let me fall a step to the rear, where I may consider
with more detachment how, like a dryad, she expresses and completes
the woodland vista.
“I had a letter this morning,” I began, “from an unknown lady. It
would amuse you.”
“Would it indeed?” said Cornelia, moving swiftly forward and at the
same time calling my attention to the twittering brown flutter of a
tree full of cedar-wings.
“Yes,” I insisted, “I’m sure it’s as interesting as bird study.
This lady doubts your existence. Listen to this.” I pulled forth a
delicately tinted letter with a faint scent which died among the
pungent fresh odors of the rain-washed air. “‘Tell me,’ she writes,
‘whether Cornelia is real. If she is, I hope you are not in love
with her. She is the feminine of Sir Austin Feverel. She has no
heart. She is just unfaltering correctness. As a girl, I fancy, she
folded her still hands in her lap and calmly waited till her family
had consulted the bankers and the genealogists before she decided
to care for the man she married. As a woman, she wishes to inspect
and authorize every passion before she allows it to peep. I pity her
children. She has never done a thing in her life merely because for
one rapturous hour it seemed the most desirable thing in the wide
world to do. I should hate her.’”
Cornelia brushed me sidelong with the sweep of her gray eyes, of
which the effect, when one catches it so, is like that of the cool
rays of a May sun bent to a focus under a burning-glass. But she
only said, “What queer correspondents you have! And what a charming
impression of me you have given them! Am I as hateful as that?”
It isn’t difficult to say complimentary things to Cornelia. The
difficulty is not to say them. But I make it a practice not to answer
rhetorical questions. They divert one from one’s point. “Please
remember,” I said, carving my accents on the air with my crabtree
stick and looking straight ahead, “please remember that this is
not my portrait of you, but only the comment of one woman upon the
image of another woman reflected in the eyes of a man who has worn
spectacles for many years. But I have another letter—from a novelist;
he has a quite different theory of you.”
“Is it nice?” asked Cornelia, with a demipirouette and the
instinctive capricious smile of a very pretty woman about to step
before a mirror. “You should tell me something very nice to offset
the spitefulness of that horrid person. But what a silly question!
Your letter is from a novelist; so of course it isn’t nice. Is it?”
“No,” I replied, “I’m afraid it isn’t nice—in your sense of the
word; but it is interesting—in my sense of the word. I call a thing
interesting, you see, when it seems to be earnestly pointing in the
direction where truth, like a rabbit, has just disappeared in the
bushes. Now, this novelist belongs to the large and productive group
of hunters who are leaving the highroad to pursue truth into the
underbrush. His theory of you is not a personal reflection upon you;
it is only part of his general theory of society and human nature.”
“Bah! bah! bah!” Cornelia exclaimed. “I’m sick of human nature—their
theories of it, I mean. I love people, but I hate what our current
writers say about them. Life is so much more decent, when one knows
how to live and whom to live with, than any of our novelists will
admit. I have the same feeling in the theatre. I go to a play and see
nothing in it that can compare with the quality of real experience—if
one has any taste and discrimination. But tell me, now, what does
this dreadful creature say about me?”
“Well, I’ll take the risk,” I said, “since you have the courage or
the curiosity to insist on it.” I pulled out the second letter.
“What he says is this: ‘I am afraid your Cornelia is not real. For
me, at any rate, she doesn’t exist. She isn’t elemental. She isn’t
spontaneous. She strikes me as a theoretical construction to please
a Victorian grandmother. Or perhaps I had better call her an old
bachelor’s pipe dream of a lady. One can’t write modern fiction
from that point of view. It’s insubstantial. We realists have been
demonstrating now for years that Judith O’Grady and the Colonel’s
lady are very much alike beneath the skin. We have destroyed
the legend of the lady, and we have destroyed the legend of the
gentleman. We have put them out of their misery: they don’t exist any
more. We’re just men and women together. If you don’t know Cornelia
as a wife, you don’t know her—you don’t know her as a realist. Women
are not like her—not inside. Go beneath the surface, and you’ll find
the Judith O’Grady in Cornelia.’”
“What nonsense!” cried Cornelia. “What perfect nonsense! Give it to
me.” And almost snatching the letter from my hand, she tore it into
fine shreds, and tossed it showering into a wild currant bush.
III
PREREQUISITES OF A DECENT MARRIAGE
“Don’t you see,” she continued, as we came over the brow of a little
hill, “why I can’t have Dorothy reading these current novels? I
don’t wish her to be what this creature calls ‘elemental’ and
‘spontaneous.’ I wish her to be civilized and rational—and not a
well-dressed little savage, ready to act at once on whatever passion
or fancy or circumstances put into her head. I wish her to associate
with people who are rational and civilized, and, when she marries,
I wish her to marry a man who is civilized and rational. Do you
know, that in the course of the last year I have met just one man
in fiction who seems to have retained elements of the ideas of a
gentleman,—or rather, one man and his father,—I mean the hero of
Struthers Burt’s _The Interpreter’s House_. As for Mr. Burt’s women,
they are almost as uncivilized as anybody’s.”
“Isn’t there a season of life,” I suggested, “in which almost
everyone has some uncivilized promptings?”
“Is there a season in life,” countered Cornelia, “when a properly
trained person cannot present at least the appearance of discretion?”
“My dear Cornelia,” I said, “do you ever glance through those columns
in our great national fireside magazines, in which wise old editors
converse with their contributors and advise young girls how to catch
a man?”
Cornelia smiled, and then abruptly became very firm and grave. “That
is it,” she said. “That is exactly it—‘how to catch a man’! And the
dreadful thing is that the tone of our entire popular discussion and
our popular literature is just about at that level—as if the mere
possession of anything in the shape of a man were so unquestionably
desirable that no scruple must be raised regarding his family and
social position, his religion and principles of personal conduct, his
property and prospects and professional standing. We are becoming
absurd in our carelessness about such matters.”
“But that,” I protested, “is just what makes the beauty of life in
America.”
“That,” said Cornelia, “is what makes American life so ugly—no
respect for any of the things that make people respectable, no sense
for the substantial basis of social distinctions, no regard for the
hedges and barriers behind which one tries to cultivate the flowers
of a finer garden.”
“That,” I said, “is the really decisive evidence of our freedom from
snobbishness.”
“It is the decisive evidence,” said Cornelia, “of our deficiency in
taste.”
“You lack patience,” I persisted. “It is the new social wisdom of
democracy.”
“It is the new social idiocy of democracy,” she replied; “and let
me assure you there is none of it in my house. If I lack patience,
I possess some experience. I was taught by my mother to be kind and
considerate to servants—my old nurse loved me like a daughter. And I
was taught at home and in church to be charitable to poor people and
ignorant people and people without advantages and without manners.
But I was also brought up to believe that a nice girl had better be
dead than form a sentimental relationship with one who was not in her
class—not a gentleman.”
“Don’t you think that is—a rather silly and outworn prejudice?” I
ventured.
“I certainly do not,” she replied. “I think the salvation of a girl
is her pride—legitimate pride in her family, her position, her
connections. I have conscientiously striven to train my daughter
to feel that, so far as her personal fortunes are concerned, common
people—that is, vulgar ordinary people—simply are not in the world.
Call it snobbishness, if you like; I am proud of it.”
“But Cornelia,” I said, “can’t you concede that in the relation we
are discussing, there is something more elemental and imperative than
can be governed by such considerations as you put foremost?”
“Yes—to the sense of animals and savages. Yes—to the sense of
vulgar and ignorant people. To the sense of what my mother used to
call gentlefolk—emphatically, No. To them, there can be nothing
more elemental and imperative than just those considerations which
distinguish them from the ignorant and the vulgar.”
“You yourself have half apologized for the old word, ‘gentlefolk,’”
I nagged. “Please tell me what gentlefolk were, or rather, what a
gentleman is. Must he belong to the Church and be a member of the
militia? For how many generations must he be able to trace his
family? How much money must he have in the bank? How much of the
Decalogue and how many rules for perfect behavior may he break in a
day, without losing caste? Are you quite clear about all this?”
“You have a very irritating way,” said Cornelia, “of trying to
make the most sensible and obvious positions absurd to maintain.
But you know I am right. You know that there is nothing absurd in
being conscious of the claims of the Church and the State and the
established system of morals and manners. You know there is nothing
absurd in being conscious of the significance of money in enabling
one to take and maintain a position of dignity and influence. A man
has no dignity nor influence until he enters relations with the
instituted and continuing forms of society. And though silly little
girls may think they could spend a happy lifetime ‘traipsing’ after a
gipsy minstrel, a wife knows better. Every married woman knows that a
husband without dignity or influence is a perpetual humiliation.”
“Very possibly,” I said; “but you were going to define a gentleman.”
“Why, a gentleman,” said Cornelia, “is a man so well bred and so
intelligent that he knows what I have just been saying, without being
told; consequently he doesn’t ask a nice girl to marry him if he is
aware that he can offer her nothing but perpetual humiliation. A
gentleman is a man whose character has been formed by the standards
of civilized and rational people. To him these considerations are so
elementary and so familiar that he acts upon them spontaneously.”
“Then you would admit,” I suggested, a little petulantly, “that what
a man is, _after_ he is a vestryman, an officer in the militia, and a
property-holder, may have a certain remote bearing on—on the felicity
of a marriage, if you think that of any importance?”
“Of course I think that of importance,” responded Cornelia. “Don’t
be foolish. I am discussing the conditions in which felicity begins
to be possible. You recall what Henry James says so beautifully:
‘The object of money is to enable one to forget it.’ In the whole
course of my life, I believe I was never before hectored into saying
so flatly what the prerequisites of a decent marriage are. But you
and your novelist friends—you realists, as you call yourselves—have
filled the world with the glorification of merely instinctive and
utterly irrational ‘matings,’ or with childish sentimentality about
them; so that now, when I talk with Dorothy about suitable and
unsuitable marriages, I find myself obliged to reconstruct for her
the very rudiments of common-sense.”
I do not consider Cornelia subtle, but sometimes she says the same
things that she would say if she were subtle. However, if I was
being instructed over the head of her daughter, I did not propose to
acknowledge it. “My dear Cornelia,” I remonstrated, “do you forget
that I am not Dorothy?”
“No,” she said, “but I often think you are just as sentimental.”
IV
CORNELIA APPRECIATES HER HUSBAND
The old road dips here into a hollow, where an extensive thicket
of wild roses encroaches upon it and diminishes it to a narrow and
thorny footpath. We picked our way through it single-file and in
silence. Cornelia, emerging some steps ahead, turned and waited,
waist-high behind the briars, smiling—with a rose in her hand and its
hue in her face. Suddenly she seemed a long way off—twenty years off.
The breeze had brought youth into her eyes if not into her mind. She
was very lovely, and I wished the wind might have loosened a wisp—why
couldn’t it?—of her sunlit hair; but that was too much for the wind.
Her own arrangements had been complete.
She fixed the rose in my coat.
“Cornelia,” I said, as we footed it again together over the vivid
green gloss of dewberry leaves, “You remind me of an old sweetheart
of the seventeenth century—who also married a diplomat. I mean
Dorothy Osborne. When Temple was courting her, she wrote to him, oh
quite delicious letters—one in particular, in which she says she has
been crying over the story of Baucis and Philemon. ‘Methinks,’ she
says, ‘they were the perfectest characters of a contented marriage,
where piety and love were all their wealth, and in their poverty
feasted the gods when rich men shut them out.’ But in that identical
letter she warns her lover that ‘_this is the world_; would you and I
were out on’t!’ And in the next letter she derides the foolish young
people who marry for love, and pointedly reminds poor Temple that
all the world must be informed ‘what fortune you have, and upon what
terms I marry you—that both may not be made to appear ten times worse
than they are.’”
“Yes—yes; I remember,” Cornelia said, with—I thought—a faint note of
reverie. “Love and wit met in that encounter, and both came away much
improved. I must give that book to my Dorothy. She was a sensible
girl—Dorothy Osborne was a very sensible girl. It is a book that will
help a young girl to understand that she needn’t be an idiot.”
“At heart,” I said, “even the sweetest of women are as hard as nails,
aren’t they?”
“Someone has to be,” said Cornelia.
“You mean,” I interpreted, “if the young lovers aren’t to make fools
of themselves.”
“Yes,” she said, “or old ones, either.”
“H’m,” I resumed; “what I was getting at was this: when I was a
young fellow, with even less experience than I have now, I used
rather to revel in reading tragedies and tales of dismally bitter and
disillusioned men. All young fellows do. I suppose it intensifies the
sense of their own existence. In the presence of dark and disastrous
things—sin, crime, murder for love, and so on—they persuade
themselves that they are drawing close to the ‘throbbing heart of
reality.’”
“Yes,” said Cornelia, “you used to like tragedy.”
“But now,” I said, “I am following an entirely different clue. I have
a theory that the only matter that is really worth investigating is
happiness. And so I haunt the trails of people who are reputed to be
happy, or who act as if they were happy; and I pester them for their
secrets.”
“An odious habit,” she said. “Besides, you won’t learn anything.”
“Cornelia,” I continued,—not solemnly, you understand, but with my
lightest touch,—“are you as entirely happy as we all think you are?”
“You don’t imagine that I should tell you if I were not, do you?” she
said—this also with the light touch. “Of course I am!”
“Then I suppose that if I asked you to outline the personal
characteristics of, let us say, the sort of man one’s daughter should
choose in order to have a high prospect of a happy marriage—why, then
you would just hand me back a quick sketch of His Excellency, your
husband, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course I should,” she replied without hesitation. “I am proud
of Oliver. He has made a place for himself in public life. Men like
him—he has hosts of men friends; and his relatives are all suitable
people. He has been able to provide amply and even lavishly for the
comfort of his family, and has given us the advantage of years of
foreign travel and residence. He cares a good deal for appearances;
but so do I. He likes to live expensively; but he knows how to live.
And he is never, like so many men with careers, too busy to live or
to let other people live unless they can be swept into the stream
of the monster’s ambition. He is never too busy to enjoy what he is
doing.”
“Astonishing virtue, in the circumstances!” groaned my envy.
“And then he is generous to us all—and reasonably tolerant, and
really kind-hearted and sympathetic with people that he likes; and he
and the children positively adore one another. I like that in him.
His temper has its stormy seasons, but for the most part it is gay;
and even when he is very angry, he is rather entertaining. He has so
much humor that he seldom bores himself, and so much intelligence
that he seldom bores anyone else. Everything in the world and at home
seems to interest him vividly. He thinks of something new to do or
to say every morning of his life. Whatever man or woman he meets,
seems to be the one person in the world that he was hoping to meet
at that moment; but I think he actually doesn’t care very much for
women, except in their purely decorative aspects. Sometimes he is a
little exacting, but he is generally appreciative; and he has very,
very nice ways of remembering birthdays and anniversaries. And then,
in tight places he always does the right thing; in a crisis, one can
rely on him.”
“Cornelia,” I said, clipping a row of flame-weed with my stick, as we
quickened our pace, “I have just passed through a terrible minute.
You know that Oliver is the only man in the world that I envy. I have
been checking off each trait of his against my own, and the only
trait that I have in common with this happiness-producing paragon is
that my temper, too, has ‘stormy seasons.’”
“That’s too bad,” Cornelia said maliciously, “for I don’t consider
Oliver’s temper his best trait.”
“No, nor do I; you omitted the finest virtue of the perfect American
husband. What I admire most of all in Oliver is his sending you into
the country for the summer—and his sublime confidence that he will
get you back again in the fall.”
“The quiet is nice here, isn’t it?” she said; “but hadn’t we better
turn about? The sun is slipping into that indigo cloud-bank.”
V
WE DISCUSS THE INNER LIFE
We plunged over the ridge by a steep path to the lake, in order to
make the short return by the shore. The wind was now blowing hard
and the waves running high. I began to feel like taking it easy, but
Cornelia is indefatigable. She drew up her shoulders, threw back
her head, drew a deep breath, and went cutting into the wind like a
gallant yacht.
“Oh let’s slow down a bit,” I called. “I’ve only just begun to
understand something. Something very important about happiness.
It flashed into my mind—literally flashed—as you struck that
Samothracian pace northward.”
“If it’s as important as that—” she said, relenting a little in her
stride. “But don’t you like to walk fast? Nothing makes me so happy.”
“I have a theory,” I said. “One can’t walk fast when one has a
theory. It’s a theory for which you are partly, perhaps mainly,
responsible.”
“Then it isn’t horrid, is it?”
“Oh no! It is very nice indeed. But even now, while we delay, it
has grown into three theories. In the first place, there are no
perfect husbands, and there is probably only one perfect wife. In the
second place, happiness is in neither wives nor husbands, but only
in the relation between. In the third place, people who are unhappy
in marriage are so, usually, because they don’t know how to give
themselves to each other. In the fourth place,—it’s four now,—that
unhappy ignorance is chiefly due to erroneous conceptions of the
self.”
“Just what do you mean by the self?” she said. “My metaphysical
brains are weak.”
“Well, the traditional, romantic, and generally popular conception
is, that the self is a very deep and precious mystery of ‘the buried
life,’ an elusive being hidden away inside,—always inside,—in a
secret garden of the personality, where it murmurs to itself the most
delightful and ineffable secrets, which can be communicated to any
other self only in a mystical physical fusion of selves—or confusion
of selves.”
“Yes,” said Cornelia, “I understand that. It is something like the
religious or sacramental theory of marriage, isn’t it?”
“Something like some people’s notion of it,” I replied. “But please
follow this argument. Under the illusion that the self is such a
being, and only so to be come at, romantic lovers fret themselves to
a fever, and decadent heroes and heroines tear each other to bits,
and ignorant contemporary husbands and wives separate with bitter
recriminations, each charging that the mysteriously rewarding self
sought in the other was not to be found.”
“Well?”
“Well, the reason it was not found is that it was not there. There is
no such secret garden; there is no such mysterious self to reward the
mystics of the romantic quest.”
“Don’t you think so?”
“No,” I said, “I think, up to a certain point, our brutal modern
naturalists have followed truth much more faithfully than the poets.
And I believe that in educating our young people we had better follow
them to the same point. My novelist friend is right in holding to his
theory that Judith O’Grady and the Colonel’s lady are much the same
beneath the skin.”
“Bah!” cried Cornelia. “If you say that again, I shall hate you.”
“And I shall ask to be forgiven,” I said, “and you will forgive me so
graciously that I shall sin again. But I’m very serious about this.
Judith and the lady are very much the same—beneath the skin.”
“I hate you!” Cornelia cried. “I could stick you full of pins.”
“Beneath the skin,” I continued, “Judith and the lady consist of
closely similar metabolic apparatus and so forth, and a certain
amount of vacant space—and nothing else. And since the apparatus
is the same, there is every reason to believe that it functions in
essentially the same way in performing the duties assigned to it by
biological destiny.”
“You are disgusting,” said Cornelia.
“If I dwelt too long on the point, I should be,” I agreed. “Viscera
and vacancy: that is what Judith and the lady have beneath the skin.
And that is why I think the naturalistic novelists are foolish if
they dwell too long there.”
“Is this your nice theory?”
“No,” I said, “it isn’t; but it is a sort of basis for my theory.
First, we establish the fact that the interesting and precious and
desirable self isn’t ‘inside.’ Then, don’t you see, it must be
outside. Well, it is outside. It doesn’t exist till it gets outside.
All the differentiation, the distinction, the qualities, which
you and I value, are outside and are created by means analogous
to the means of art. In so far as people—any people, married or
otherwise—really give themselves adequately to each other in love or
in friendship, and impart happiness with the gift, they give a self
that is externalized, objectified, and tangible—so to speak—in some
form of useful or beautiful activity, which occasions no insatiable
and consuming fever, but the real joy of benefits given and received
and the delight of a loveliness that descends on the contemplative
eye like the free grace of God.”
“Your theory improves,” said Cornelia; “I don’t wholly understand it;
but it improves.”
VI
A THEORY OF HAPPINESS
The foam was now running high up the beach. I splashed straight
through it, in spite of my shoes. But Cornelia, lighter footed,
danced with it like a partner in some fantastic minuet, returning to
my side and my argument only when the creamy gliding meander ebbed.
“A man’s power to impart his best self,” I said, “depends on the
woman’s power to receive it.”
“Of course,” said Cornelia, “all that any man, even a genius, asks of
his wife is intelligence enough to appreciate him.”
“No,” I said, “that isn’t true. That is going by. There was a time
when a husband thought of himself as the pianist, and of his wife
as standing behind him to turn the pages of his music. But nowadays
we begin to think that the ideal concert is by two performers on
perfectly synchronized independent instruments—not soloist and
accompanist but, say, organist and pianist, each as important as the
other.”
“Nonsense!” said Cornelia, “We shall never expect that. But we
do like our accompaniment to be applauded when we play well—and
especially when we don’t.”
“If there is one subject in the world,” I said, veering a point,
“about which I am more densely ignorant than another, it is women,
and what they really like.”
“That’s quite true,” she lilted.
“But I knew a lady once—”
“Still another lady?”
“A most exquisite lady. And I often wondered why, whenever ‘the idea
of her life’ came into my ‘study of imagination’, I invariably saw
her in a setting, as if the setting were an organic part of herself.”
“Well it is, isn’t it—if one puts a little effort into it to make it
right? It is in the setting—isn’t it—that one has one’s opportunity
to express what you call the self. It is in one’s husband, children,
friends, and one’s home and habits and things and so on.”
“Yes, but in the case of this lady there was a curious point about
the setting. Wherever she was, seemed to be the centre of the
picture. She always seemed to frame.”
“What an attitudinizer she must have been!”
“She was not. It was only, I think, that she seemed to bring out and
accentuate everything near her that harmonized with her own vibrant
and articulate life. When I saw her in her drawing-room, it framed
her; and she appeared as fine and finished as if she had stepped from
a canvas of Watteau’s. Her books and pictures and tapestries became
as intimately hers as her garments, so that I have felt her almost
visibly present in that room, even when she was not there. Sometimes,
in a perverse mood, I have said, ‘This is all a pose’; and, trying to
go behind the elaborate expressiveness of her artificial surroundings
and to tease her out of perfection, I have gone on rough walks with
her in woods and in the open, half hoping that she might revert to
the inarticulate pathos of Nature. But the instant she stepped from
the frame of art she stepped into the frame of the landscape; the
greensward spread itself before her like Raleigh’s cloak; groves
offered themselves for a background; and I finally concluded that if
she came up out of the sea, like Botticelli’s Cytherea, the sea would
clothe her and her pearly radiance appear but an extension of the
lustrous nacre of some deep-sea shell.”
“You are fanciful,” said Cornelia.
“I am not fanciful,” I replied. “I express just as simply as I can
with words my sense of the quite blessed outwardness and availability
of this lady’s self. I don’t think she knew it, but—”
“But that shows how ignorant you are of women,” she said, and swept
me again sidelong with her gray eyes.
“But whether she knew it or not,” I reasoned, “she possesses a secret
of communicating happiness—a kind of happiness which I can only
describe as pure serenity at concert pitch. Perhaps she was merely
born in tune with some fine instrument which the rest of us rarely
hear. Perhaps she is right, after all, in thinking of the art and
discipline of the traditional lady and the traditional gentleman as
the technique by which the true and precious selves of our fellow
creatures are most likely to get themselves expressed.”
“I believe,” said Cornelia, “that your theory is coming out rather
well, and in time for tea.”
“My only reason for elaborating my theory is, that it is based upon
the practice of a lady whose theory is infinitely surpassed by her
art.”
“Is it, indeed?” she said.
“When I got the theory built, I was planning to say that I should
wish a daughter to choose for her husband neither one of the
sheik-monsters who of late have been devouring our damsels, nor yet
the inexpressive and unmodified vestryman whom you commended to our
admiration this morning, but rather a youth who should have a bit of
the old bachelor’s conception of what might be in the relation—an old
bachelor, I mean, who had known in his own youth, an exquisite lady.”
“Why lug in the old bachelor?” Cornelia asked—a little cruelly; for
we were already at her door.
“Because,” I said, as she waited on the step for my leave-taking,
“because time and meditation and the naturalistic novelists have
convinced him that, almost without a pang, he may resign to Mr.
O’Grady and the Colonel the similarities of Judith and the lady,
provided only that, from time to time, he may refresh his memory and
his senses with the lady’s differences.”
“Meaning—”
“Why, meaning that the kind of man whom a girl like Dorothy should
choose should know that the passion hymned by the naturalists is
naught, sheer naught—”
“You really mean that?”
“—in comparison with the quality of love to be had in its high
moments of general joyous awareness of the entire radiant life
of a fellow being—meeting his perceptions and recorded in his
imagination, clothed in color and motion and talk and laughter and
fresh air, the head turning with frank gay light in the eyes, the
lips parted in speech, while the springing step goes rhythmically
over the wide-stretching earth under sunlight and blue heavens.”
“It will be a long time,” said Cornelia, “before Dorothy needs to
trouble her head with that. Meanwhile, we shall occupy ourselves with
the rudiments. Shall we see you at mail-time to-morrow?”
“Yes,” I said, “and we’ll take up Oliver’s case, perhaps. There’s
going to be a fine sunset. _’Voir!_”
VII
THE REAL THING
As I entered the wood path through the birches that run down to my
own cottage, I thought I saw a boyish youngish figure slipping among
the trees to the eastward. A moment later, I met Dorothy walking
demurely up the path, with a book in her hand, closed upon one finger.
“Watching the sun set?” I asked, diplomatically.
“No,” she said, “watching him disappear.”
“Watching whom disappear?” I inquired, being invited.
“Oh, a boy that I like. We’ve been reading one of mother’s new books.
It’s about a girl, Deirdre, who didn’t want to marry a king, because
there was a boy that she liked very much better—in all ways. And so
they ran away and lived in the woods—and died happily.”
“Oho!” I exclaimed. “I suspect the happiness of their death has been
greatly exaggerated. It seemed to me rather dreadful. It’s James
Stephens’s version, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Dorothy, and turning the golden dusk of her eyes with a
sweet young gravity full upon mine, she added: “How old was my mother
when you first knew her?”
“About your age, Dorothy. Why do you ask?”
“Was she very different then—from the way she is now?”
“She was quite a bit like you, then,” I said, “if I remember. But why
do you ask?”
“Because,” she said, “she has marked the loveliest passage in this
book. And I can’t understand why, because she isn’t like that now—not
at all like that now.”
“Isn’t like what?”
“I mean,” said Dorothy with perfect lucidity, “that this passage
expresses just the way this boy and I feel. Shall I read it to you?”
“That wouldn’t be quite nice,” I suggested, “would it, Dorothy?
Good-bye!”
“Perhaps not,” she agreed; but as she moved toward the house, she
turned and called after me: “But if you want to read it, you can find
it on page one-hundred-and-forty.”
In my own copy of James Stephens’s _Deirdre_, I have marked, on page
one-hundred-and-forty, this passage:—
“Lacking him, what could be returned to her? Her hands went cold and
her mouth dry as she faced such a prospect.
“The youth who was hers. Who had no terrors for her! Who was her
equal in years and frolic! She could laugh with him and at him. She
could chide him and love him. She could give to him and withhold.
She could be his mother as well as his wife. She could annoy him and
forgive him. For between them there was such an equality of time and
rights that neither could dream of mastery or feel a grief against
the other. He was her beloved, her comrade, the very red of her
heart, and her choice choice.”
BOOK THREE
TREATING OF MODERN GIRLS
I
THE EDUCATION OF DAUGHTERS
I have always looked with admiring astonishment on parents who
have daughters on their minds, and yet are not broken by the
responsibility; and next to the weight of immediate responsibility
for a daughter I should place the burden, which some mothers still
take upon themselves, of choosing a daughter-in-law. In my callous
moods, I say that the ordinary run of children make as good matches
for themselves as they deserve, and that they had better be left
to their own devices. But if I were a parent and had successfully
brought up to the “magnetic age” two such delightful children as
Cornelia’s, I suspect that I myself shouldn’t be able to resist
attempting to be a Providence to them. Over a daughter, especially, I
suppose I should make a particular fool of myself. I should probably
try to keep her for the most part like a bird-of-paradise in a cage,
and when I let her out, should endeavor to control her flight by “a
thread of my own heart’s weaving.” And I am positive that any youth
who presented himself as a candidate for her hand would, unless
he were the possessor of incredible perfections, have desperate
difficulty in winning mine.
I did feel reasonably competent, nevertheless, to discuss eligible
sons-in-law with Cornelia. The young men of to-day are not notably
better or worse than the young men of twenty years ago, nor is the
problem of choice among them essentially altered. I know a good man
when I see him, as well as Cornelia does. But what is a good daughter
or a good daughter-in-law nowadays? It is a horrid question. It leads
one into the hot air of clashing ideals.
With respect to girls, I admit at once that I am in a state of
confusion and uncertainty, and that I may appear to be in a place
where the light is dim, not merely because girls, between the period
of George Sand and the period of Miss Amy Lowell, are said to have
changed rapidly and essentially, but also because in the vast and
engrossing literature of this subject I have remained _homo unius
libri_, a man of one book—of strictly limited experience. As I
remarked to Cornelia in all humility, only a day or two ago, if there
is one thing of which I am more densely ignorant than another, it is
women, including girls. If I were suddenly called upon to indicate
to a son my notion of the ideal woman for a lifelong companion, I
fear that I should not get beyond faltering forth a vague and most
likely quite unpersuasive description of the virtues of Cornelia;
and he, if he were as acute as I should like a son of my own to be,
would doubtless inform me that it isn’t the virtues of Cornelia that
take me, but her charm, which I don’t understand. At any rate, my
personal curiosity was so happily and completely arrested by my first
discovery of perfection that, in the twenty years which have elapsed
since that time, I have never felt impelled to explore any further.
I recall, for example, that when a few years ago I visited England in
order to look up the baptismal record of an Elizabethan lawyer, I met
on shipboard a vivacious young Frenchwoman who had compassion on my
obviously lonely state and proposed one day that we make a couple of
constitutional turns around the deck. At the end of the first turn,
during which I had dallied a bit with the weather in my ingenious
American fashion, she shrugged her shoulders—that is, I suppose she
did, for she was very French—and exclaimed, “_Allons donc, causons de
la femme_ (Well, now, let’s talk about women)!” I had read somewhere
or other that Frenchwomen excel in the light discussion of serious
themes and general ideas; and if she had proposed that we discuss
palæography or epigraphy, I should have been delighted to observe how
French feminine wit handles such subjects. But in the face of the
topic proposed, I was aghast. I had no intention of talking Cornelia
over with a perfect stranger; and feigning dizziness from the motion
of the ship, I rather abruptly “saved myself,” as the French say, and
went below.
It is, curiously enough, Cornelia herself who in these later years is
driving me to reopen the subject, investigate it, and “take a stand.”
I haven’t, till lately, felt myself to be in an uncertain position
or in a dim light, but rather in a very certain position and at the
radiant centre of light. I don’t wish to change my stand. Neither,
of course, does she wish me to change it. Yet, if I alter, her own
inflexibility will have been the prime mover.
It comes about in this way: she goes into the country as religious
people go into a retreat—to escape from dusty contacts with the
bustling democratic world, to collect her soul, to fortify her
principles, and to renew her vows of allegiance to the conceptions
of the good and the beautiful which she inherits from several
generations of ancestors accustomed to giving the tone to the society
in which they lived. It is utterly impossible to think of Cornelia
at present as a _grande dame_—she is too young, there is too much
of the morning clinging to her; and I cannot bear to dwell on the
possibility of its ever deserting her; yet in the treasonable hours
of the imagination I do occasionally steal forward on the straight
highway of time, and I can see that, thirty years hence, if she holds
her course, if she fulfills her destiny, she will be a beautiful
and proud old lady, still giving the law to her children and to her
grandchildren—what people call a _grande dame_.
But the tide of democratic vulgarity is running into the country
havens and stealing insidiously into the securest retreats. One’s own
friends and neighbors are tainted with it. One’s own husband brings
a whiff of it up from the city at the week-end. One’s own children,
in spite of all segregation and antiseptic precautions, show a mild
infection with it in their speech, in their manners, and even in
their tastes. One doesn’t compromise with it. One “stands firm”; but
one stands ever more and more alone.
I admire Cornelia’s ability to stand alone against the world, against
her own times, and against the practice of the city and the tyrannies
of fashion; and, when she is wholly right, as I think she often is,
it is the pleasantest thing imaginable for me to stand with her. But
I am beginning, at an advanced age, to develop skepticism, and to
look with an uneasy skeptical eye upon a rectitude of taste which
isolates one too sharply from one’s own flesh and blood—such “pure
and eloquent blood” as speaks in the faces of Cornelia’s children.
When she expects me to side instantaneously with her against the
budding ferment of her own son and daughter, I hesitate. I reluct,
like a man called from the roadside to leave the sweet intoxication
of an orchard in May. I become curious and loath to close the windows
of apprehension to the rumors and fragrance of another springtime.
On the morning—Friday it was—after our windy walk by the lake,
Cornelia, contrary to my expectation, did not appear at mail time
under the big elm which shades our little grove of R.F.D. boxes.
This was a surprise, because she had virtually agreed to be there
and she habitually performs with precision whatever she has agreed
to do. Later in the day, however, I learned that her husband had
unexpectedly arrived in a hydroplane, with an officer in the naval
flying corps, and that he would stay over Sunday, which was Dorothy’s
birthday. We seldom make calls in our summer community, except, as we
say, “on intimation.” Accordingly I waited for an intimation. All day
Saturday, to my increasing wonder, there was nothing but silence from
His Excellency’s household, and, in the phrase which high usage has
now made classic, “damned little of that.” But I quite anticipated
a birthday party on Sunday—for Oliver Senior makes much of these
occasions—and probably a fire on the beach in the evening, with the
latest gossip and best stories of the city. There was no party, and
there was no fire.
On Monday I went down my path to the mail boxes with acute curiosity.
The carrier’s Ford had apparently broken down on the mountain, for
he was nowhere in sight. I found Cornelia sitting alone on the bench
under the elm; the other pilgrims, weary of waiting, had scattered
along the marshy lakeside in search of lady’s-slippers, which were
abundant this year. She was all in white, and she sat with her
bronze-gold head leaning against the gray trunk, and with one hand,
lying listlessly across her knee, holding her soft white hat. If I
were not afraid of being called bookish and pedantic, I should admit
that as I approached she reminded me of Ariadne in Naxos; as it is, I
content myself with remarking that she seemed a little languid. She
did not rise.
I observed the point, because listlessness is not her “note.”
“I hoped you would come,” she said.
“It’s a lovely morning, isn’t it,” I exclaimed, in a sudden awareness
of the truth of what I was saying.
“No, it isn’t a lovely morning,” she replied. “It’s a horrid morning.
Come and sit down. I want to be comforted.” Looking into her cool
gray eyes, I saw that I had been mistaken. It wasn’t a lovely
morning; there was a cloud in the sky.
“You, comforted?” I said incredulously, and seated myself at the
other end of the bench, for I felt my hopeless inexperience with
Ariadnes. “I thought you were always happy. Where is Oliver? I heard
he came Friday night, but I haven’t seen hoof or horn of him.”
Cornelia looked out for a moment silently over the deep, still,
intense blueness of our lake, mirroring the blueness of the morning
sky. I suppose in that rapt moment—I haven’t seen her look more
purely poetic in years—she was deciding whether it was her duty to
tell me a loyal lie or whether she might relax and tell the simple
truth. As she was in one of her rare moments of languor, she decided
for the truth.
“I am vexed with Oliver. I sent him back to town on Saturday. I told
him that I didn’t wish to see him again this summer.”
“Why, Cornelia!” I cried, “What in the world has Oliver done? Is it
proper for me to hear? Has he been flirting with his secretary? Or
has he been beating you? Or what?”
“He has been beating me.” Cornelia dabbed at the corner of one
eye with her handkerchief; and I imagine there may have been some
occasion for it, though I did not see it. She held her lower lip for
an instant compressed under her perfect teeth. I noticed these things
because in twenty years’ acquaintance I had never witnessed them
before—but once, and that was in the dark backward and abysm of time.
Then she smiled faintly and repeated:—
“Yes, he has beaten me. Dreadfully.”
“The monster! What have you done to merit blows? You don’t look
bruised, Cornelia. Now that you have wept, you look like a calla lily
after rain.”
“What have I done? I have done nothing but try to bring up my
children as children should be brought up. And I am bruised and
beaten. Oliver has betrayed me. I am fond of Oliver. I am his best
friend. Oliver is—Oliver is a good deal of a dear—in his way. But
it does seem as if, when it comes to the children, he acted like
an irresponsible boy. Oliver is fifty-two. He acts as if he were
fifteen, or as if he wished that he were.”
“I don’t doubt that he does,” I said, “and I have always thought that
his boyish gusto was a positive element in his charm, and the quality
especially which makes his children so fond of him. But tell me, now,
what he has done, and I’ll try to judge him as he deserves.”
Cornelia began doubtfully and far away from the main point, in
accordance with the manual of tactics for women.
“Well, first of all,” she said, “he came up here in an aeroplane. I
have forbidden him to fly. At his age and with his family, he has no
right to take such hazards merely to amuse himself.”
“Perhaps not,” I said, “but you know that you like Oliver because he
is the sort of person who does take hazards. If he weren’t, you would
despise him.”
“Of course,” she replied. “If there were real occasion for it, I
should despise him if he were not the first to risk his life. But he
does it now—and these other things, I am convinced—mainly because he
knows how much I dislike them. I don’t see what possesses him.”
“What other things does he do, Cornelia? Oliver is at one of the
‘dangerous ages.’ And perhaps his children are beginning to influence
him. You mustn’t forget that Dorothy and Oliver Junior have reached
an age at which offspring frequently have a very unsettling effect
upon their parents.”
“Well, listen. You know how much I dislike what people call ‘the
modern girl’ and all her works and ways?”
“Yes.”
“And you know how hard I have tried to keep Dorothy in her
old-fashioned sweetness and innocence?”
“I don’t see what there is old-fashioned in Dorothy,” I said. “But
she is sweet. I supposed God had made her so, and that the work
couldn’t easily be changed, and that all you had to do was to stand
aside and watch her blossoming. But since you say that has been a
trial, I must believe that you have been tried by it.”
“Yes, and so does Oliver—I mean, he knows perfectly that it isn’t
easy for me to keep the right influences here and the wrong
ones away. But what do you suppose occurred to him as the most
appropriate birthday present that he could send up here by express
to his daughter, the day before he came last week? An expensive
knicker-outfit, a handsome cigarette-case, and a big package of his
own cigarettes.”
“Oliver has to have his little jest.”
“Little jest, indeed!” retorted Cornelia almost grimly. “When Dorothy
opened the bundle, of course I supposed that Oliver had enclosed the
cigarettes for his own use. But Dorothy said, ‘No, mother, they are
for me. Father promised them to me on my birthday.’ She opened the
box, and there was a poem from Oliver, addressed, ‘To my daughter
Dorothy with her first box of cigarettes,’ with a lot of rigmarole
warning her against the excess of smoking more than one at a time!
I thought he had gone crazy, and I was so angry that I snatched the
cigarettes and the case from her and threw them into the fireplace.”
“If you take the jest seriously,” I said, “I don’t blame you for
being perturbed. I haven’t any clear moral principle on this point.
Many girls do smoke; and I think we shall ultimately have to concede
that smoking isn’t a ‘sex function.’ But smoking and Dorothy don’t
go together, in my feeling for the fitness of things. It seems like
offering snuff to Viola or a Manila cigar to Rosalind. (You ought not
to forget, by the way, that those two girls did wear knickers.) But
smoking—why, I should as soon think of offering a plug of tobacco to
you, Cornelia.”
“Ugh! Don’t be disgusting,” she pleaded.
“I’m not disgusting. I am only expressing my sense of the
immeasurable gulf that lies between you and anything of questionable
taste. But go on with your story.”
“Well, Oliver arrived that night. When I asked him what he meant
by the performance, he laughed in that infectious, irresistibly
disarming way he has, and said, ‘Oh, I have been reading Heywood
Broun on the care and nurture of children. The young man has ideas.
He thinks the way to equip youth for the battle of life is to gird
upon them the sword of early experience, the buckler of knowingness,
and the whole armor of sophistication. And I’ve decided to turn over
a new leaf and meet my children halfway. Treat them like equals,
instead of like superior beings. Dorothy will learn to smoke next
fall, when she goes to college. It may be the only useful thing
she will ever learn there. _Qui sait?_ But if she waits till then,
she will learn with a parcel of silly goslings who will think it
is devilish. Let’s try the effect of having her begin now at the
domestic fireside with her own father and mother, who don’t think it
devilish.”
I could seem to see a certain reckless experimental method in
Oliver’s madness—as in the serious proposal of some other reformers
for “communal bathing” in the household, as an antidote to precocious
sexual curiosity. It was an experiment which I should be willing to
have tried on a dog. It had something in common, indeed, with an
undeveloped notion of my own on the use of moral antitoxins. But I
could also see that Cornelia saw nothing of the sort. So I merely
asked, “And what did you say?”
“I said,” she replied, “that Dorothy’s mother did think it
devilish—that Dorothy had never seen her mother smoking and never
would. He laughed again and said, ‘Then she will never learn
to do it like a lady.’ I inquired whether he were incapable of
distinguishing between what is permissible in a man, perhaps
pardonable in his typist, and what is undesirable in his
seventeen-year-old daughter. He reminded me that three fourths of
the ladies he knows smoke, and that Russian women, French women,
and English women can’t understand why we make a moral issue of it.
I said, ‘So much the worse for them. I am sick of having something
obviously bad in America excused merely because something obviously
worse exists elsewhere.’ He said, ‘Cornelia, you are a Little
American. You are out of step.’ And I lost my temper, and exclaimed,
‘Oliver, you are a great idiot! Dorothy hasn’t smoked yet, and she
wouldn’t think of smoking now, if she hadn’t a fool for a father.’”
II
FLAGS OF REVOLT
As this was the first and remains the only occasion in my life
on which any married woman has ever revealed to me any serious
altercation between herself and her husband,—though I have been
informed by others that such revelations are not uncommon,—I was
astounded.
“Why, my dear Cornelia!” I exclaimed, “that was a fighting word. Was
it then that Oliver beat you?”
“No,” she answered with a partially reassuring smile, “I wish he had.
Oliver sulks when he is angry. I flash out what I feel, and have it
over with. Oliver sulks and plots some revenge—some ingenious, horrid
little revenge that he knows will make me furious.”
I gasped inwardly—if one can do that; but I tried to play the part of
the unruffled confessor. I was learning so much that was new to me
about happy family life. “Well, what did he do next?” I asked.
“He took a box of cigars and a novel and went up to his room, to bed.
At six o’clock in the morning he got up and roused the household,
apparently in the jolliest humor, ringing all through the house the
big dinner-bell that we use to call the children from the woods. He
made Dorothy put on her new knickers, and got the car out, and drove
off to town with the children, ‘for a lark,’ he said. They came back
about noon, and drove up to the door, and honked. I went out; and
there was Dorothy in her knickers on the front seat with her father,
both of them smoking, and Dorothy with her hair—her lovely soft
hair—bobbed above her ears, and her neck shaved like a convict’s. I
could have cried—either with grief or with rage. And Oliver, simply
bubbling with joy, called out, ‘I’ve met them halfway, Cornelia
darling!’ Wasn’t he horrid? Wasn’t he perfectly horrid? I didn’t cry.
But Oliver went back to New York by the afternoon train. And now you
know why there was no birthday party last night.”
III
BLOOM
“Cornelia,” I said after a moment of intense meditation, “I think—I
am not sure, but I think you are making a mistake.”
“I am sure!” she retorted. “I am not making a mistake. I know
perfectly well what I am doing. I have never been more certain about
anything in my life than that Oliver is wrong—utterly wrong. What
mistake am I making?”
“You are making the mistake which nine tenths of the good people of
our generation are making in dealing with their own children. You
are making the mistake of trying to suppress the symptoms instead of
diagnosing the disease. Knickers and the rest are symptoms. Of what?
You ought to be thinking about that, but you are not. Cigarettes and
bobbed hair are flags of revolt. You are interested only in capturing
the flags and burning them. But what is the revolt about? That is
what you ought to be thinking about; and you aren’t thinking about it
at all.”
“I am thinking about it,” she protested. “I am thinking about nothing
else. I am not a simpleton. Personally I do abominate bobbed hair
and cigarettes, but I am not afraid of them. What I am afraid of is
the disease, or the revolt, of which they are the signals. It is the
state of mind which goes along with them. It is the precious and
irrecoverable things that disappear when these things appear.”
“I don’t quite follow you.”
“I mean the sweetness and freshness of young girls—their bloom.
Don’t you care, don’t you really care, even you—Oh, how shall I make
you understand what I feel about the preciousness of the bloom on
things, and on boys and girls who have been brought up happily and
wisely in the right surroundings! Ever since I can remember I have
had the strangest ecstatic sense about everything that has just come
new into the world—dewy things, roses and morning glories early in
the morning, little bits of babies, a pear tree all a soft mist of
white blossoms, the slender little new moon in a green sky low in the
west over treetops at nightfall, robin’s eggs, just peeped at, in a
lilac bush, the rosy-white tips of old grapevines, the silvery mist
of plums before they are picked—anything, everything lovely before
dust or heat has touched it and before anyone, anyone, has pawed it
over. When I was a young girl my heart fairly ached with tenderness
for this quality in things—and with a passionate desire to preserve
it. When one grows older, the desire doesn’t die out; it becomes
only intenser, sharper, with years, till it goes through one like
pain. And as I was walking over here this morning, I kept thinking
of all these things that have it—have the bloom; and of my little
Dorothy—who had it, till her own father brushed it off.”
Cornelia uttered this speech swiftly and with a kind of soft, eager,
glowing sincerity which terribly disquieted my judgment. But I
somehow felt that I had slipped into the position of advocate for
the rest of Cornelia’s family, which stood at the moment in dire
need of advocacy. I smothered my instinctive emotional response, and
exclaimed:
“Nonsense! What you value in Dorothy can’t be brushed off. Bloom is
only the transient breath of qualities that extend in her from rind
to core, like the red in a blood orange. You are reveling in a mood,
or you yourself would recognize that bloom—intactness—is preserved
only by unsuccessful, undiscovered, sterile things. If it remains, it
becomes a badge of uselessness. It is meant only for a brief seasonal
show, which we may enjoy while it lasts; but it is silly to grieve
over it. Other beauties follow—the full moon, and birds that break
the lovely blue shells to bits and sing. Dorothy is breaking through
her shell. That is all.”
Cornelia sighed: “If it only were! But you don’t know anything
about the revolution that takes place in a girl’s mind, and in her
character, the moment she puts on the badge of those who have ceased
to care for ‘intactness!’”
“I’m not sure that I do.”
“Well, the next time that you see three girls with bobbed hair and
knickers—abominable word!—and with cigarettes in their mouths, edge
up to them and overhear if you can what they are talking about: some
unmentionable novel, some unprintable verse, some unspeakable ideas
of some outrageous ‘reformer,’ something revolting that is sanctioned
in Europe but, alas, has not yet been sanctioned here, some silly
‘martyr’ who has got into jail for some offence against decency, some
crazy girl who has ruined herself as completely as the heroine of the
latest novel. Perhaps you will hear them discussing what I overheard
a group of our modern maidens debating not long ago—whether if a man
and a woman registered at a hotel as husband and wife, the laws of
this state would not recognize them as such.”
“These are ‘strong’ topics,” I said. “I don’t think they are the only
topics that girls with bobbed hair discuss, though they doubtless are
discussed by girls with bobbed hair—and also by some girls whose hair
reaches to their knees. But what you are always forgetting, Cornelia,
is that life is full of strong topics. We can’t get away from them
or keep them from the knowledge of our children, unless we are ready
to abolish eyes and ears. At the most, we can only cover them over
a little and keep still about them. I think you fall into the same
fallacy regarding the conversational discussion of them which you
fell into regarding the discussion of them in current fiction. You
conceive it an error of the first magnitude to admit the existence of
evils which every one knows exist. What I should try to ascertain,
if I edged up to a group of ‘modern’ girls in conclave on these
themes, is the point of view from which they were speaking—the amount
of common sense which they were bringing to bear upon the vices and
follies of their contemporaries.”
Cornelia likes the _ad hominem_ form of argument. “If you had a
daughter of seventeen,” she said, “should you enjoy seeing her blow
the smoke through her lips and hearing her wisely consider the legal
consequences of registering at a hotel under the names of ‘John Doe
and Wife’?”
“If I had a daughter,” I replied cautiously, “I have a sentimental
notion that I should like to have one who at the age of seventeen
would feel the æsthetic impropriety of smoking, and who at any rate
would not feel her nerves on edge without tobacco. But suppose
Heaven visited the sins of the father upon the child by giving me
a—well, a ‘modern’ daughter. If my daughter, after emitting the
smoke, ejaculated the word ‘Geese!’ with a good accent, and a clear
cool sound of conviction, and a kind of contemptuous remoteness
from Greenwich Village problems, why I think I should feel mightily
reassured. I should be positively glad to have heard her express
her mind on this strong topic. And if tobacco helped her to express
her mind, as it helps me to express mine, I might even feel mildly
grateful to the tobacco.”
“You know you would not,” said Cornelia.
“Perhaps you are right. But at any rate, I can conceive of no person
more properly subject for satire than a man with the fifth cigar
of the morning in his mouth taking up the battle axe to make war
against the first cigarette of his wife or daughter.”
“You are merely talking for argument. I hate you when you do that.
You get so far away from me that I can’t talk with you.”
“No,” I insisted, “I am not talking for argument. I am pleading
in behalf of your sex, for equality of access to the good things
of life, whatever we may finally decide are the good things. I am
pleading for a little moral justice toward your sex, and for the
necessity, if there is to be justice, of a little discrimination.
You don’t seem to discriminate at all among your ‘modern’ girls. It
simply isn’t true that they are all discussing suppressed novels
and illicit love affairs. Many of them are far more interested
in horseback riding, duck-shooting, hockey, golf, or hiking to
Yellowstone Park. I am not sure what our girls are going to get out
of their political activities; but I know what they are going to
get out of their athletic activities. I am an uncompromising and
enthusiastic adherent of athletic life for women—not Country Club
women alone, but all women.”
“I approve of women exercising,” assented Cornelia, “if it can be
done in a nice way. I don’t care for Marathon runners and champion
swimmers and that vulgar display of limbs in the newspapers.”
“Cornelia,” I said, “you use the word ‘nice’ too much; you overwork
it. Your son told me the other day that, whenever he mentions a new
girl acquaintance in your presence, you have only one question about
her: ‘Is she nice?’ ‘It gets on my nerves,’ he says, ‘to hear that
everlasting: Is she nice?—Is she nice?—Is she nice?—till I don’t
care whether she is nice or not; and I feel like saying, No, she is
horrid; but she sings like an angel, and she dances like a wave,
and she makes a sparkling quip, and she has brains of her own, and
she is attractive, and she is reasonable, and she is a good sport,
and she doesn’t squall when we get caught in the rain. I don’t go
around asking girls whether they are nice. How should I know? Mother
means well and is perfectly fine herself, and all that. But somehow,
you know, it strikes me as kind of nasty for a fellow to be always
thinking whether a girl is nice.’ And there, my dear Cornelia, you
get a bit of the spirit of the younger generation, which is, I think,
essentially sounder and healthier than the perpetual incensing of
‘purity’ by some earlier generations.”
“In what way is it sounder and healthier?”
“Why, I mean that it isn’t the presence of sexual characteristics
and impulses in an adolescent or in an adult that renders him or her
‘not nice.’ That is a part of nature and of humanity. What is not
nice is perpetual preoccupation with these impulses. And perpetual
preoccupation with them results from isolation with them, and
exclusion from anything else of equal or superior interest. I am
convinced that many of your ‘modern’ girls are discovering that fact
for themselves. And it is because they dread the bondage and guess
the degradation of confinement to a single instinct—it is because of
this that they are groping so eagerly for other interests. For many
of them, bobbed hair and cigarettes are signs that they are filling
and freeing their minds with advertising, real estate, journalism,
medicine, law, field geology, geographical exploration, and political
organization.”
IV
CAREERS FOR WOMEN
“Is that the sort of woman that you would have married,” said
Cornelia, “if you had married?”
“Let us not discuss the woman I would have married. Or rather let me
remind you of this about her: the reason why the woman I would have
married decided not to marry me was her clear-eyed perception, after
some tears and emotional stress, that love was not enough to live on:
that what I could offer her was not enough to make up a life for the
many-sided being that she knew herself to be.”
I paused a moment for a response. But Cornelia kept silence, looking
out over the blue water. I continued:—
“If a girl is so placed in the world that she can find expression for
the versatility of human nature in a really satisfactory domestic
life and really satisfactory society and luxurious travel and
beautiful surroundings and the fine things in literature and art and
the rearing of really superior children—why, then she may not be
tempted at all by advertising and real estate. But can’t you see,
Cornelia, that for the immense majority of girls the only way of
getting anything but their conjugal and maternal capacities valued or
expressed, and the only way of getting even their feminine charms to
a suitable market lies through some such avenues as I have mentioned?”
“Yes,” said Cornelia, “I know girls are going in for these things
more and more; that is why I am so much worried about my son. I don’t
want him to become interested in that sort of girl. She wouldn’t
make him happy. She wouldn’t be a good wife for him. Yet, just now,
he seems to have a mania for ‘girls that do things.’ I know it’s the
fashion for girls to ‘do things’ nowadays; but don’t you hate to see
them doing them?”
“I truly do not. I admit that ‘careers’ for women are still in a
more or less experimental stage. But the results from the ancient
experiment in keeping women out of careers are all in. I am curious
to see the results of the more recent experiment. Professional men,
as life wears on, come to look upon a career, with all its burdens,
as literally the one indispensable element, without which existence
would be intolerable. For ages, men have lied to their sweethearts;
have deceived them into thinking sweethearts and wives are the
indispensable elements in the happiness of men. But it really is not
so.”
“Oh, isn’t it?”
“No. And the girls themselves are finding it out, and are very
sensibly claiming a share in the substantial satisfactions of life.”
“You have no imagination. You don’t understand. It’s so simple,
so perfectly simple. Substantial satisfactions for men are not
substantial satisfactions for women. That is all there is to it. The
things that please you and fill your lives are sawdust to us—after
the first novelty wears off; and they leave our hearts aching and
burning. I am certain there isn’t a mature woman in business who
wouldn’t admit, if she were honest, that if the choice were open,
she would choose even a moderately successful marriage in preference
to a brilliant success in business. They are making a mistake—such a
mistake. I am sure that, in their hearts, they know from the outset
that it isn’t what their hearts desire.”
“About the hearts of young girls,” I admitted, “I know next to
nothing. I am still curious about them because I have heard so much
about them. But the only occasion on which I ever asked a girl for
her heart, she gave me a stone. And I believe that, far oftener than
most men suspect, the place in the pectoral cavity of women assigned
to the heart is occupied by some far harder substance. You remember
that lovely creature in Balzac whose lover overheard her in solitude
exclaiming, ‘My God! O my God!’; and the words seemed to him to come
from the uttermost depths of her heart and made him love her more
passionately than ever, till he learned that she had merely been
anxious about her stock speculations—and that the deep suspiration
really came from the woman’s purse.”
Cornelia was not impressed by this reference to Balzac. She has a
capable business head herself, and manages her property, which is
considerable, with more judgment than her husband displays. She
ignored the malice in my speech and merely remarked:—
“A nice woman need not be a fool in money matters.”
“No,” I continued, “and many of them aren’t. That is why I believe
many of them are not making a mistake but following a real vocation
when they turn to business. I don’t know much about their hearts, but
I have had extensive opportunity to observe their brains, and, in
some respects, I am tremendously impressed by them.”
“Oh, we have some common-sense among us,” she agreed.
“It isn’t common-sense so much,” I corrected, “in which girls excel.
It is a special faculty of their sex, a kind of darting velocity
of mind, which men of other races, the Jews and the Chinese, for
example, display more abundantly than Anglo-Saxon men. In manual
deftness, in celerity of apprehension, in executive readiness, in a
kind of swift practical insight, in flying straight to the point,
girls and young women are proving dangerous competitors. They remind
me of turtle doves, which, you know, have two very different notes.
They coo and coo in the woods, till you think that a mournful
amorousness is all they are good for; but if you start them up,
they go ‘piet, piet, piet’ at ninety miles an hour to their next
destination.”
“Oliver is quicker than I am,” said Cornelia, whose generalizations
on the virtues rest largely on observation of her own family, “but
Dorothy is quicker than her brother; and I am quicker than you are.
Yes, I think you are right. Girls are quicker. But quickness isn’t
very important in itself. The important thing is to know where one
is going.”
“Girls show,” I proceeded, “very many of them, what the advocates
of mental tests recognize as officer quality. I suspect that, if
the draft were made universal, and if the army tests were applied
to all the women in the country, not only would the disgrace of our
moron percentage be greatly abated, but ninety-nine per cent of
the men would be obliged to serve in the ranks. Among women, there
is an immediacy of reaction to stimuli, a freedom from dubitation,
subordinate considerations, and inhibiting afterthoughts, which make
them invaluable members of a General Staff, when the General Staff
is infested with doubting Thomases, Hamlets, and authorities on red
tape.”
“If you think that,” inquired Cornelia, “why don’t you, and why
doesn’t Oliver, give more attention to what I tell him is right?”
“Because,” I replied, “we are harassed by subordinate considerations
and afterthoughts. But that is just what makes women want to get
their hands on things and manage them. I am astounded every day to
discover in how many big businesses and even political organizations
there is some woman, who has perhaps risen from a stenographic
position, sitting in with the chiefs of the concern at the centre
of the web and actually telling the ‘big wigs’ what to do—actually
ruling the whirlwind and directing the storm.”
After this speech, I glanced at Cornelia to see whether she would
admit to herself her own master passion, her suppressed desire. I
could see that she was doing something which she ordinarily would no
more think of doing in my presence than of doing up her hair: she was
reflecting.
“Possibly,” she conceded.
“Not possibly,” I pursued, “but certainly. All women crave mastery,
beginning with the government of their own husbands; and their
happiness, after the first feigning delight of amorous surrender,
is to extend their jurisdiction, to enlarge the limits of their
empire. It is the quality that makes queens. It is the quality that
made Elizabeth and not Burleigh the ruler of England, and Catherine,
not her minister,—whoever he was,—ruler of all the Russias. It is a
quality which you yourself possess, my dear Cornelia, in abundance,
only you haven’t an adequate throne to display it on; and so,
instead of sending Raleigh to South America for galleons of treasure
or telling the president of your company which railroad to buy
next, you have to take it out in sending Oliver back to the city in
disgrace because he has had Dorothy’s hair bobbed.”
“How I hate him!” cried Cornelia, as if still nursing the bitterness
of defeat.
“Really?” I asked, in a momentary flutter of hope.
“But if queens feel as miserable as I do,” she added, “since I have
had to discipline him, I don’t wish to be a queen.”
“You have no choice,” I murmured.
“But here comes the mail,” she exclaimed, rising suddenly and putting
on her hat. “Come! Let’s go and meet it.”
My secret hope sank like a stone into cold depths of resignation.
“All right,” I assented sadly; “but why such eagerness for the mail
this morning?”
“Why, I am hoping,” she lilted, “I am hoping, of course, for a letter
from Oliver, you idiot!”
BOOK FOUR
CORNELIA AND DIONYSUS
I
ENNUI IN THE PROVINCES
The smooth order of Cornelia’s life was interrupted on New Year’s Eve
by a distressing occurrence which I—which all of us who possess a
rudimentary sense of tact—insist on calling an accident. It was not
the sort of thing that I had ever thought of as likely to intrude
upon the felicity of that household. My own convulsive unuttered
response to the shock was: “That it should have happened to them!”
But as it, or something very like it, actually happens every
day,—once, twice, three times a day all through the year in every
big city,—there was really no reason for assuming that they would
remain indefinitely immune. The circumstance which seemed at the
moment to point the accident with a piercing significance, a chilling
personal meaning for us, was, I suppose, the mere coincidence that
we were arguing in the abstract about just such occurrences when the
brutal reality of the thing burst in among us with the effrontery
of a bandit in a Pullman car. Of course it admits of the natural
explanation which I shall give, leading up to the mishap in the
order of my own approach.
Cornelia spends the winter months in the city, in a desirable
apartment near the lower end of the Park—an apartment so spacious
and so desirable that an old New Yorker once amused himself at
my small-town ideas by asking me to guess the annual rental. As
her children, Dorothy and Oliver Junior,—the centre of her summer
solicitude,—are at their preparatory schools except during the
holidays, she devotes this season to her women friends, to her
husband, and to her husband’s friends. I group in this way the people
whom she entertains, first, because she has no men friends who are
not her husband’s friends, and, second, because her husband has an
endless string of interesting official and unofficial personages
whom he gets up—or brings up—from Washington for conferences or for
exhibitionary or other mysterious diplomatic purposes.
As an ancient admirer—to put it discreetly—who has sunk through
the incalculable accidents of life to the level of an educational
counselor or referee, I confess that I find Cornelia just a shade
more perfectly herself in the country, where she is comparatively
alone with the children and nature and her books, than in the city,
where, on my occasional expeditions, I see her but seldom and then
usually so beset with husband, friends, and personages that there
is little opportunity for the long educational tête-à-têtes of
the summer. Of these conversations, be it admitted once for all,
the secret excitement is in listening for the occasional lilt of
Cornelia’s lyric youth amid the finished certainty and assurance of
her later manner. Her own mature authoritativeness I can deal with in
a fashion and even relish; but in the winter, in the daily proximity
of her husband, she has an intolerable habit of throwing out flying
buttresses, of quoting Oliver—“Oliver says,” and so forth—as if she
were referring a country lawyer to a decision of the Supreme Court.
It is a little painful.
Still, in the winter holidays I like to call on the two of them in
their own characteristic setting, for a variety of reasons which
will be obvious enough to all those provincials who spend the gray
season quietly sitting in silent, snowbound prairie towns and
villages, dreaming, like waifs in a Scandinavian fairy tale, of the
bright commotion of crowded streets and thronged foyers and Duse and
Pavlowa and grand opera and Conrad and Lloyd George and Swinnerton
and windows full of new books and golden gowns and cut flowers. I
remember once remarking to them, after they had taken me into one of
their theatre parties in the grand style: “Art for the upper classes;
morality for men of moderate incomes; religion for the poor.” “No”;
retorted Oliver, with his instantaneous eye for the weak spot in my
armor: “Art for the cities; morality for the towns; religion for the
villages.”
We provincials are, it is true, fairly well disciplined to the
stoic “apathy”—a kind of cultivated hardening of the heart towards
everything beyond the reach of our hands and the range of our eyes.
Through month after month the rosy knuckles of temptation may knock
on our hardened hearts in vain. But recent investigation proves that
under constant percussion and strain the hardest substances yield:
steel girders buckle, flywheels burst, and bridges wear out and give
way to a malady known to science as “the fatigue of metals.” An
analogous malady, attacking even the most firmly tempered of hearts,
accounts for the popularity of Charles Lamb’s “moral holiday,” that
excursion from the moral macadam which nowadays we call a detour. It
explains, too, in my own case, the sharp nostalgia for the city which
afflicts me annually on the depressing morning after Christmas. On
that spiritless day-after, I feel like a camel that has ruminated
on its last cud and can no longer batten on the desert and the west
wind. I feel like a wretched silkworm in a glass jar, which will
swiftly perish of inanition if not supplied with fresh mulberry
leaves. That explains why I pack my bag and, by the first Limited
train, creep to the city, under the pretext of reading a paper before
one of the learned associations.
What I am coming to is the rather curious fact that the attraction of
Cornelia’s winter establishment is perhaps due less directly to her
than to her husband, and to the refreshing and—for me—delightfully
relaxing air of worldliness which circulates around him. Cornelia
wonderfully incarnates the Eternal Feminine, which is supposed to
draw us upward. But in the interim between Christmas and the New
Year’s Resolutions one doesn’t desire to be drawn upward. All one
wants is to escape from ennui and suffocation. In the colloquial
idiom of our section, one “wants out.” And Oliver, in the negligee
of old acquaintance, is a most agreeable, realistic, and sometimes
rather witty Mephistopheles, letting one out of conventional and
cloistral habits of thought, and leading one by sharp detours into
the heart of things as they are. Clearly, I don’t dislike Oliver:
I envy him, and, like his other familiars, call him “Excellency,”
a title which I believe few persons except the Governor of
Massachusetts have any right to use officially. Nor do I think that
Oliver really dislikes me: he pities me, and calls me “Professor,” a
title which he has also conferred, in my presence, upon the learned
Greek who polishes his shoes. I tell him that both the Greek and
I have a better right to our titles than he, for Oliver is now
writing his reminiscences of the war, and has at present no official
Washington connection whatever, busy as he seems to be there.
I envy him the variety of his life, the interest and importance of
his personal relations, his position inside the façade of public
affairs, his understanding of the huge subterranean dynamos which
operate the puppet-show of politics, his familiarity with the little
hairsprings which govern the dynamos, his chatter of Wall Street and
the Departments and the Legations, and his inexhaustible stock of
unpublished anecdote. In public he has had the reputation of a strong
team-worker, a sound administrative man; and in the newspapers he
passes as a champion of the common people, friend of the farmer and
the laboring man, and the rest.
But twenty-five years of more or less public life have not
stereotyped his mind. In private, indiscretions bubble from him like
water from a spring. He utters the most profane and contemptuous
condemnation of major enterprises of his party. In a friendly circle
he will even repudiate, with perfect recklessness, the “asininities”
to which he has been constrained by various public considerations
to subscribe. I twit him on the essential duplicity of the official
character. I call him what he seems to my academic sense to be—“a
tough little Yankee crab apple, coated with the wax of European
diplomacy”; “a hard-shelled individualist steeped in Nietzschean
philosophy and merely dipped in democratic shellac.” I insist that
there is no more milk in him than there is in a billiard ball; and
that he values the plain people as a professional golf-player values
his caddies.
In revenge, Oliver blandly replies: “The only trouble with you
professors is that you know absolutely nothing about life”—a
charge which I always admit; and then pump him for information.
He responds with the—I think—sincere conviction, shared by many
Eastern statesmen, that we Mid-Westerners are of an unsubjugated
alien race, ominously multiplying within the borders of the
otherwise United States, and mainly occupied with the propagation
of miscellaneous fanaticisms. He has not yet forgiven me “the
pacifism of the Mississippi Valley when the seaboard was aflame.”
He ascribes to me the “bolshevism” of North Dakota, and is always
inquiring solicitously: “By the way, how did you come out with your
investments in the Dakota bonds?” Sometimes he pretends that, as I am
from “Puritan Kansas,” I may have scruples against breakfasting with
them “on the Sabbath”; if I accept, he turns to Cornelia and gravely
warns her not to forget “the Nebraskan’s grape-juice.” Or he will
ask my permission to light a cigarette, remarking, “As you are from
Utah, I feared it might be offensive to you.” His mocking compassion
is often excited by my provincial residence and by my profession. I
don’t mind his designating me as “Pascal,” nor his reference to my
correspondence with Cornelia as _Les lettres provinciales_. But, in
one of his sharper moods, I remember his saluting me as “Calpurnia.”
I asked him to enlarge a little on the idea. “Oh, it’s nothing,” he
replied, “only I hear that nowadays they are dismissing all the men
from university faculties and manning them with Cæsar’s wives—with
persons ‘above suspicion.’ I always think of you professors as
Cæsar’s wives.”
Cæsar’s wives? Oliver’s immediate implication, I suppose, was merely
that the public expects on the part of instructors of youth a
quasi-priestly character, a many-sided and inhuman exemplariness of
opinion and conduct such as neither the youth in our charge nor their
parents require of themselves. But Oliver meant more than that. He
meant to suggest the absurdity to the realistic mind—the practical
invalidity—of the entire professional and schoolmasterly point of
view, and the Utopian insubstantiality of our ethical and social
vision. Cæsar’s wives! The sting of that quip, which he planted in me
last summer, was still rankling a bit on a gray hungry morning a few
days after Christmas, the poison of it being its truth; and a doubt
was stealing insidiously into my mind, like the snake into the Garden
of Eden, whether perhaps the influence of the secular priesthood
over the democracy might not be greater if the priesthood abandoned
its attempts to appear so supremely untouched by the gross human
infirmities of the democracy, when I received a note from Cornelia,
and, half an hour later, a telegram from Oliver. Like all government
officials and even private citizens who have much breathed the air of
official Washington, Oliver scorns the post office, even for personal
correspondence. For brevity’s sake, I give the telegram:—
CORNELIA NOTICES YOU SPEAK HERE SATURDAY STOP DINE WITH US MONDAY
AT EIGHT THIRTY STOP NOBODY ELSE BUT YOUR NOVELIST FRIEND VERNON
WILLYS STOP WATCH THE YEAR OUT DISCUSS FUNDAMENTALISM AND BURY
BACCHUS STOP SEMIOFFICIAL STOP WE WANT MIDWESTERN POINT OF VIEW
STOP REGARD AS IMPERATIVE
I packed my old suit into my old suit-case, slipped into my inside
pocket the old club-paper which was to pay my expenses, snatched
a book of Gilbert Murray’s to read on the train, and crept slowly
eastward on the Limited. My diary shows that my occupations during my
first forty-eight hours in the city were about as follows:—
Read my paper, “A Much Higher Education,” before the Saturday
Afternoon Club. Cornelia was present and I spoke with her for two
minutes afterward. Saw _Cyrano_ Saturday night and college friends
in the stockbroking business for three hours following. Slept
Sunday morning till cathedral service. Lunched with a poet in the
baking-powder business who read me his free verse on an affair
between a Jewess and a Chinese laundryman. Spent the afternoon
looking at the pseudo-Rembrandts in the Metropolitan, and the
evening at a concert. Saw journalistic friends downtown Monday
morning. Afternoon; at rehearsal of a Little Theatre play called
“Self-Realization”—lively. Publishing friend at his club till six:
showed me manuscript of “Petronius Enamored” and put his collection
of suppressed novels at my disposal. Walked in Riverside Park till
seven, then went to hotel and dressed for dinner. As I was leaving
for the West on the 2.37 in the morning, I packed my bag, and checked
out. Oliver and Willys might want to talk till daybreak.
II
NEW YEAR’S EVE IN NEW YORK
Mulberry leaves! These details I include in order to indicate briefly
how I reduced the unmannerliness of my provincial appetite before I
put in my appearance at Oliver’s, and, leaving my bag at the office,
went up one flight to their apartment. I don’t like to seem too eager.
As I stepped into the clear soft blueness of the candlelit apartment,
Cornelia rose, a silvery shimmer, from the settee where she had been
chatting with Oliver Junior, and, approaching with Artemisian stride,
greeted me with her finished graciousness. The artistic perfection of
it might subtly pain a sensitive heart, were it not for the intimate
reassurance imparted by the rippling overtones of her voice, which
resolves art into intoxication and curiously persuades a man in
evening dress, in the heart of the city, that he is standing in the
midst of a garden full of flowers. I muse.
Cornelia swiftly explained that Oliver Junior, though festively
attired, would not dine with us. That spirited and well-groomed youth
would, in a few minutes, drive his sister and two of their friends
to a young people’s party in Scarborough. After I had asked him a
few banal questions about his school, a topic which did not appear
greatly to “intrigue” him, he edged into the adjoining room and
diddled with the piano till his sister Dorothy skipped in, looking
like an adolescent Bacchante,—she is a little over seventeen,—and
they disappeared together.
Cornelia in the meantime had also explained that Oliver Senior was in
the library with Vernon Willys. “I don’t like him much,” she added,
“in fact, I think him rather horrid. He is very happy to-night over
his separation from his wife. He could hardly wait to get inside the
door to tell us about it. But I believe you have discovered something
precious in his books, and Oliver seems infatuated with him. They
have been running around together all the fall. He is doing a
political novel now, and I accuse Oliver of sitting for the portrait
of the hero. But here they are.”
The two men came in from the library with red buds in their
buttonholes. Oliver as usual saluted me with a volley of questions,
which he gave me no time to answer, and with an animating smile,
in which I always feel a slightly satirical edge. Willys, whom I
had met once or twice before, nipped my arm, smacked his lips, and
murmured with a communicative flicker in his eyes that I must be sure
to see His Excellency’s library before I left. As we moved toward
the dining-room, Oliver’s quick fire continued: “Did you get my
telegram? Get the point about Bacchus? I’m feeling the pulse of the
country on this prohibition business. Willys here has convictions, I
find—just as many convictions as you have, but different. I got you
two together in the hope of hearing you beat each other’s brains out.
I hope you’ll do it in good style. Give him the Mid-Western gospel.
I’ll hold the coats. I’ve arranged the proper setting. But be human,
Professor! Be human—just for to-night!”
It is not my intention to describe the dinner in detail. The
excellence of a dinner _à quatre_, for any but a quartet of
gourmands, is merely to provide a soft-footed ministration of
successive felicities to the appetitive nature while the higher
faculties, stimulated by the æsthetic accessories of the feast,
nimbly engage in the discourse of reason. Of the material details,
my memory is as indistinct as an impressionist poet’s. I recall only
the tall silver of candlesticks on an immaculate whiteness which was
doubtless linen; and a soothing greenness which may have been holly;
and a dark rich redness which was certainly roses; and a fragrance,
mingled, various, which was partly roses and partly, well, I sat at
Cornelia’s right hand, and in that dazzling proximity—she carries her
head so proudly that Time has hardly ventured to touch a wisp of her
bronze-gold hair or to breathe near her shoulder—in that proximity I
did not notice, honestly did not notice till some seconds after we
were seated, that in front of each plate was a half-moon formed of
three delicate glasses, glowing with candlelight reflected from the
varicolored souls of old vineyards.
Vernon Willys quite audibly drew in his breath, which after the
visit to His Excellency’s library was a discreet enough thing to do
with it. Oliver, glancing at me, repeated: “Remember, Professor—be
human.” Then he raised his ruby-colored glass toward the novelist and
said: “Let us drink to the death of Bacchus.” The two men clinked
and instantly drained their glasses. Cornelia lifted hers in my
direction, just touched it with her lips, and then replaced it in the
semicircle. I was thinking of Ben Jonson’s old song, that Anacreontic
thing about the thirst that rises from the soul. But what I did with
my glass, since whatever I did would grievously offend many persons’
notion of the right thing to have done, I absolutely refuse to
disclose. That point is of quite subsidiary relevance.
The thing which engaged my attention as a Mid-Western ethicist and
one of “Cæsar’s wives” was not the content of the glasses nor the
number of times they were filled by the chocolate-colored Caribbean
cupbearer. A person of my long practice in the ascetic philosophy
actually doesn’t much attend to these matters. I merely—let us
say—became aware of Oliver’s Machiavellian plot to seduce me. Then
what leaped to my sense as worthy of exploration was just the
personal feeling, the intimate private attitude of my friends, of
precisely this sort of people, toward the ethical question, or
complex group of questions, which the alleged death of Dionysus and
his active posthumous life have forced into the foreground of our
consciousness. In my own circle at home no one ever says anything of
the faintest interest on the subject. When it is mentioned, there
may be some talk of law-enforcement; but the heart of the matter is
regarded as perfectly dead. Here, there was willingness and desire to
discuss the original question.
His Excellency, I knew, had publicly advocated the passage of the
obnoxious measure, and had recently given to the press a “strong”
statement on the necessity of enforcing the law. In the intimacy of
friendship, however, and in the circumstances which he himself had
arranged, that was only a provocation to my remarking, as he set down
his glass:—
“It is obvious that you support the Eighteenth Amendment with
reservations.”
“With a diplomatic reserve,” he corrected, chuckling. Willys, who had
penetrated the “reserve,” laughed. And Cornelia, crushing a smile
between her lips, entered into a rather needless explanation, of
which the intention, I perceived, was to dissipate any uneasiness
which a Mid-Western Puritan might be conceived to feel on his abrupt
introduction to a wet New Year’s Eve.
“Monsieur”—meaning Oliver—“is a little naughty,” she said, “and he
likes to make himself appear worse than he is. You must remember that
he is practically a European.”
“Oh, nonsense!” I exclaimed. “Oliver a European! Then so was Andy
Jackson.”
“Yes,” Cornelia insisted, “his tastes and habits were formed in
the earlier part of his life, when he was almost constantly abroad.
His best friends in Washington are men in the legations who aren’t
obliged to adopt our reforms. Naturally, when he entertains them
here, he doesn’t wish to seem inhospitable or absurd, like poor
dear Mr. Bryan. We don’t ordinarily have wine on the table for our
own guests—I mean outside the semiofficial connection. But just for
to-night, as it’s a holiday, and one of you is a pilgrim from the
Mid-West, Oliver thought—we thought—that you would appreciate it if
ambassadorial privileges were extended to you.”
“I get the point perfectly,” I said; “that’s Oliver’s point of
view—or one of his points of view. But please let Janus defend
himself. He will need practice before we Puritans are done with him.
But now that the theme is before us, Cornelia, won’t you give us the
benefit of your own point of view?”
“My point of view?” Cornelia smiled her Mona Lisa smile. “I—oh, I am
Oliver’s wife!”
“I have often regretted that,” I replied with a consciously
provincial affectation of urban daring; “but knowing your strict
old-fashioned convictions about marriage, I stifle my regrets. I
can’t quite reconcile your indulgent humor this evening with your
rigorously prohibitive principles regarding—well, the moral fluidity
of such novels as Willys writes. I had hoped that your conservatism,
your Puritanism, as they call it, on the marriage question would
bring you around to our position on prohibition, and so, in that
respect at least, detach you from Oliver.”
“You are dead wrong, Professor,” Willys interjected, “you are
muddled. Prohibition isn’t conservatism. It is radical innovation. It
isn’t Puritanism. As you yourself have admirably demonstrated, the
Puritans drank like fishes. I am a Puritan. So is His Excellency. We
are Conservatives. So is our hostess.”
“Your don’t read my articles, Willys,” I said, “as carefully as I
read your novels. What I demonstrated was, that the Puritan is a
radical innovator. The Puritan of our day says, ‘Let the dry land
appear.’ You are not a Puritan; you are a Fundamentalist. You wish to
return to the Flood. You are a Diluvian.”
“Now you are at it!” cried Oliver gleefully. “Go to it!”
“Excuse me,” I objected; “we haven’t heard Cornelia’s point of view
yet. I was about to say, when Willys broke in, that we educators
don’t attach any great importance to the opinions of disillusioned
politicians and satirical novelists—cynics like you and Willys.
The national culture is in process of fundamental change and
regeneration; and you belong to an order that will soon be obsolete,
with none to mourn its extinction. The future of the country is in
the hands of the young people and such of the rest of us as keep up
with them. I am totally indifferent, Cornelia, to what you think of
prohibition as His Excellency’s wife. In that capacity I doubt if
you think at all; you merely accept the situation. I am curious only
about your attitude as a parent of the new order, as Oliver Junior’s
mother. Won’t you, for example, psychologize—analyze your feelings
and tell us just why you kissed the glass and set it down untasted?”
A hint of rose—pride or some deeper emotion—appeared in Cornelia’s
face when I mentioned her son. He is her religion—the substance of
it. Her husband is the church which she attends from old habit,
repeating her belief in him with her lips, like the phrases of an
ancient creed. But what she really believes in, with a fervor of
prayer and faith, is her son. I suspected that Willys and Oliver
would think me guilty of bad taste for bringing into the conversation
a subject, as a Restoration hero remarks of his wife, “so foreign
and yet so domestic.” Somehow children seem out of place when one
is celebrating a moral holiday! But if one wishes to break down the
guard of a woman who says, “My point of view? I—oh, I am Oliver’s
wife!” one must risk bad taste. Cornelia’s voice glided softly from
gay to grave as she answered:—
“I kissed the glass for auld lang syne. I set it down untasted for
the sake of the new times and the children. I used to enjoy it, as I
used to enjoy being twenty years old. It isn’t much to relinquish, is
it?—compared with what one has to relinquish.”
When Cornelia talks in this vein about age, she seems to me—well,
just ravishingly young; and I murmured, for our angle of the table
only, “You’ve relinquished nothing!” But she completely ignored me
and continued:—
“As my son’s mother, I am very happy, under present conditions, to
know that he doesn’t drink or even feel any temptation to drink. We
refrain, my son and I, more as a matter of taste than as a matter of
conscience. Besides, he is too young. In my own home the boys had a
glass of wine on their twenty-first birthday as a part of the family
celebration. And the girls—I can’t remember that I tasted wine,
except in Italy, till after I was married. Oliver is only nineteen.
If, when he is of age, he is at Oxford, as I hope he may be, or
if he were able at home to have his wine in a natural atmosphere,
simply and innocently, with gentlemen, I should not wish to deprive
him of what I was brought up to regard as a proper element of social
festivity.”
“Bravo!” cried Willys.
“But, alas,” she concluded, “all that is gone now. And it’s all so
furtive and mean that I have a horrid feeling. And one hears so many
hateful stories about the secret drinking of mere boys and girls,
at school and at their parties, treating one another in their cars
by the roadside,—and the consequences of it,—that it’s odious, just
odious. And I—I just sigh a bit for the age of innocence, and bid it
all adieu.”
“Admirable speech!” cried the novelist, as the Caribbean
attendant refilled his glasses. “Beautiful speech: full of sweet
reasonableness—all but the conclusion. But why adieu? Why turn down
the empty glass? You fill me with lyrical melancholy. ‘Too quick
despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?’ You look too steadily on the
small dark side of the question. There is a soul of goodness in
things evil. Watch and wait! I maintain that the prohibitionists
builded better than they knew: they have driven drinking out of the
barroom and are bringing it back to the home, where it belongs, and
where as Burke says—doesn’t he?—it loses all its evil by losing
all its grossness, or something like that. You and His Excellency
are performing a service to posterity by preserving through this
destructive period the purity of a fine old tradition.”
III
HIS EXCELLENCY ON ECONOMIC NECESSITY
I turned to Oliver. “Oliver,” I said, “you have been shielded by your
wife. Now Willys is apologizing for you. Really, you know, this won’t
do. You will have to come into the open and speak for yourself. When
I go home, my friends will expect me to give them some intelligent
account of what is going on here beneath the surface of things. We
sit out there among the cornfields with our radio sets and listen to
Washington uttering austere words about enforcing the law, and the
next morning we read in the papers that there has been a party under
the shadow of the Capitol, and that there is no one to see that the
law is enforced, because all the responsible people are busy putting
away their private stocks. Slanderous, no doubt. But in the ethical
sense, how—actually—do you get away with it? Janus, explain yourself.”
“Oh, very well, Calpurnia,” said Oliver, “yours to command,
remembering only that, as Judge Black informs me, what a man entrusts
to the wife of his bosom ‘in the sweet confidences of the midnight
hour’ she is not permitted to bring into court against him. But shall
I explain myself as a friend of the government, or as the master of
my private life? As an ornamental pillar of the administration, or as
the captain of my own soul? Which shall it be?”
“Both, by all means!” Willys exclaimed. “First one and then the
other. First the marble bust and then the man. First the friend of
the aspiring people and then the friend of the downtrodden artist.
Discuss your public betrayal of your own class and then your private
loyalty to the good old cause. But tell us first why you passed the
Eighteenth Amendment. I can’t write my next chapter of _Senator
Jones_ till I have an authentic hunch, the _vraie vérité_, about
the fashion in which you and the Professor and the Puritans and
the Mid-West and the Anti-Saloon League—in short the Anglo-Saxon
minority—downed the great hearty Teutonic, Celtic, Italic, Slavic,
Hebraic majority, the glad, gay, sinful, eating-and-drinking
majority, and put it over on us.”
“My dear man,” said His Excellency in his quietly impressive
diplomatic manner, “don’t tell me that you accept that fable. You
call yourself a realist! Neither the Anti-Saloon League nor the
Puritans nor the Professor nor I had any more to do with passing
the Eighteenth Amendment than a butterfly on a steam-roller has
to do with building the Lincoln highway, or than a catfish in the
Mississippi has to do with irrigating the rice-fields of Louisiana.”
His Excellency held the point by pausing to light a cigarette.
“Well, we are waiting,” someone prompted, after duly respecting his
technique.
“_Mes enfants_,” he continued, and then blew a ring of white smoke
spinning towards the tip of one of the candles, where it hung for a
moment like a nimbus and then dissolved upward. “My children, let me
disclose to you the fundamental axiom of political philosophy—not
the orthodox but the esoteric philosophy. Distrust the press and
ignore the palaver of the man in the street. The press tells you
what it thinks will be popular. The last man in the street tells you
what he has heard said by the next to the last man in the street.
I tell you this: You may scold yourself red in the face; you may
bleed yourself white; you may shout yourself blue with pietistic,
reformatory, and patriotic fervor; nothing of any importance, of any
public consequence, is ever accomplished in this world except by
Necessity—by a succession of linked necessities.”
“The theory isn’t entirely novel, Excellency,” I said. “And now the
application.”
“The necessity which put through the Volstead Act was the war; the
necessity behind that was the sky-vaulting of wages; the necessity
behind that was maximum production; the necessity behind that was a
workman sober seven days in the week; the necessity behind that I
could make concrete to you by naming the hundred leading corporations
of the country that were in the belly of the wooden horse, making
his feet track, when the Anti-Saloon League rode on his back into
Jerusalem—or, if the figure offends you, into Washington.”
“The figure seems a little mixed at the best,” said Willys, “but call
it Jerusalem—whither the tribesmen go up to liquidate the burden of
laying taxes on us. As for your chain of necessities, now that the
war is over, that chain is falling apart. The workingman sees the Big
Brother in the wooden horse, who bullied him into working six days
in the week and into doing, according to Union standards, two days’
work in one. He doesn’t like that. Besides, he knows that his Big
Brother’s own throat isn’t dry, hasn’t been dry. The injustice rasps
him. He wants his beer again. He wants the ‘poor man’s club’ again.
And he has a jolly good right to have them. What do you say to that?”
“Oh, he has rights enough,” Oliver assented; “but the poor man’s club
has passed into the hands of a receiver—a mighty capable one. The
poor man’s club is now in the hands of his wife. She is in charge
now of the Saturday afternoons and evenings. Do you think, when her
vote is as good as his, she will let him pour his wages into the
sink? Rather not. She has spent them, spent them in advance, for a
generation to come.”
“Yes,” said Cornelia. “Isn’t it a pity! Workwomen are the most
wasteful creatures. Why, when Margaret—”
“You don’t quite get the idea, my dear,” Oliver resumed. “As I was
saying—in war time, while her old man was sober, with money bulging
his pockets and nowhere to go, she made him buy her a house and a
Ford and a Victrola and savings stamps and baby bonds. Now she’s
buying a municipal playground along the line of the old grog-shops
and a new schoolhouse and a hospital and a couple of movie theatres
and a municipal stadium and a municipal swimming-pool and God Himself
alone knows how many hundred thousand miles of the finest and most
expensive roads in the world.”
“Why, Oliver dear,” cried Cornelia, “what do you mean?” I don’t know
anything more painful than to report the occasional fatuity of a
woman whom one almost unreservedly admires. But dear Cornelia has
not meditated very deeply on the problems of the working classes.
And returning to her point, she insisted: “I’m sure Margaret hasn’t
bought any swimming pools or hospitals.”
“No, my dear,” said Oliver calmly, “I doubt if she has. But as I
was saying, she has her own ideas of a club—that woman. She is a
Progressive. As a big employer in Pittsburgh said to me yesterday,
‘She has tasted blood.’ She has dug in, and is going to extend her
works. Wages won’t go down; they’ll be higher to-morrow morning.
Why? Do you suppose that new outfit of hers is paid for? Rather
not. Do you suppose that the business men are going to continue in
business and collect their bills? Do you suppose they know what
kind of plain people pay their bills and have money to spend? I
fancy they do. Well! The Big Brother is still in the wooden horse.
Maximum production and high wages till the Judgment Day. And
Prohibition! The only ticket on which any party will hold office.
That’s my forecast—as a servant of the government and a friend of the
workingman.”
“Heaven help the poor workingman,” cried Willys, “and spare us a few
noble specimens of the idle rich. But now, Excellency, you must cheer
our fainting spirits by explaining your point of view as the master
of your private life.”
“As the master of my private life,” said Oliver promptly, “I deny
that I am any such Janus as the Professor here tries to make me out.
As a private citizen, I still believe that prohibition cannot be
repealed. Within this belief I merely include, as a private citizen,
my philosophic certainty that it will never be enforced, except
where it is economically necessary. In my case it is not necessary;
therefore, it will not be enforced. Its enforcement helps the
business of the plain people; it would hinder mine. It adds, on the
whole, very greatly to the comfort of their lives. It would detract
from mine. The whole case against liquor grew out of the plain
people’s abuse of it. The whole case of liquor will be improved by
my right use of it. There is no ‘rasping injustice,’ but a beautiful
poetic justice in their losing theirs and in my keeping mine. That
doesn’t express adequately my generosity in lending my hand to
riveting the workingman’s benefits firmly upon him. Many of the most
decorative and not the least substantial pillars of prohibition
are men of excellent and experienced palate. The most sincere and
the most competent advocates of the cause are the nonconforming
prohibitionists. I simply cannot understand the Senator who refers
to the Volstead Act as an idiotic measure and a failure. It was
absolutely necessary: nothing which is necessary is idiotic. And
every economist will tell you that it has been a marvelous economic
success. It wonderfully accomplishes what had to be done, and it
leaves undone what it ought not to do. And there you are.”
“And there _you_ are!” retorted Willys, “you and your economic
argument. But where are the rest of us? I’m sorry to say that, for
economic reasons, I can’t follow you. My bootlegger is devouring my
royalties. Therefore, as you would say, I have strong conscientious
objections to illicit liquor.”
“I had rather overlooked that possibility,” said Oliver. “But lean on
me—at least till you have finished _Senator Jones_.”
“Thank you,” said Willys, “I’ll do so. But seriously speaking—”
“Forgive me!” Cornelia interposed, with a delightful wave of her hand
flagging the onrush of the novelist’s volubility. “Before Mr. Willys
begins to speak seriously, suppose we adjourn to the library. You
remember that Oliver is likely to lose his temper if I keep him too
long at the table fiddling with cigarettes.”
IV
VERNON WILLYS ON BACCHIC ECSTASY
I have never had leisure to examine the books in the library which
range from floor to ceiling. Sargent’s portrait of Cornelia at
twenty-five hangs above the fireplace. When we had relaxed in
Oliver’s wonderful library chairs before a real log fire, and had
been equipped with an ambassadorial type of cigar, which the elder
Carib lighted for us, and had been fortified by the highest potency
of a private stock of real Java coffee, we men, at least, were in a
position to contemplate the approaching midnight with equanimity. As
soon as this change of base had been fully effected, Cornelia, who
seldom loses the connection of things, irradiated the novelist with
her most hospitable smile. (I sometimes think my feeling for her is
pure intellectual respect for her skill in keeping a good topic alive
and not letting conversation die out in small talk.) She smiled and
said:—
“Mr. Willys, you were just about to speak seriously, when I
interrupted. Please speak seriously, Mr. Willys. We are all most
anxious to have you.”
“Oh, my point of view, you mean?” said Willys. I admired his ability
to find it again so quickly. “Speaking seriously, I can’t—for more
or less obvious reasons—take as calmly as His Excellency does the
poor man’s loss of pleasures. I appeal from the tyranny of our
recent moral legislation to my constitutional guaranties of liberty
and the right to pursue my happiness where I can find it. I agree
with the Senator that the whole business is idiotic. It is idiotic
impertinence to dictate what I shall eat and drink at my own table,
or what I shall brew in my own cellar.”
“If you had a cellar?” suggested Cornelia, rather spitefully
reminding us of Willys’s arrangements to leave his house in New
Jersey to his wife, and his wife to his house. But, as I have said,
she is firm on such points.
“Spare the wormwood, Cornelia darling,” Oliver blandly interceded.
“But, Willys, if you have a better remedy for our present discontents
than mine, don’t conceal it from the country. Everyone is clamoring
for it. Only be sure it is a remedy. Be sure it rests firmly on the
necessities of the situation. There is no use in talking of anything
else.”
“I’ll tell you my remedy,” said Willys, “when I get done telling
you my troubles. I object to governmental regulation of my diet.
But I object even more to governmental corruption of my conscience.
God knows I need what little I’ve got left, and I’d like to keep it
pure. I protest against the creation of crime by Act of Congress. My
conscience tells me that moderate drinking is not a crime, but one of
the few certain solaces in this chaotic world.”
“I had always fancied,” said Cornelia, “that those who find drink a
‘certain solace’ are seldom very moderate.”
But the cork, so to speak, was out of Willys’s bottle. He flowed on
unchecked.
“I protest against the legislative destruction of old customs
which every civilized nation under heaven but ours respects.
Your Excellency has seen the vintage in Greece, Italy, France,
Germany—Persia, too, haven’t you, not to speak of our Gulf Islands?
Consider merely the picturesqueness of it! The romance of it! Blood
of the grape! Bottled sunshine! We had a bit of it ourselves, here
and there—in the green vineyards of northern California, wild grapes
on the Sangamon, moonshine in the Kentucky mountains, mint-julep
on the old Southern plantations. Even the cocktail, you know,
our own national contribution, had begun to be humanized and to
have its tender local associations, as every club of distinction
modified its ingredients and christened it with some lovely name: The
Chrysanthemum, The Chrysostom, The Golden Girl, and so forth. Doesn’t
it really stir your imagination a little?”
“Yes, yes,” said Oliver, first smacking his lips and then pursing
them with mock severity. “Yes, we grant you all that. But what
is the necessity of it? We are talking of necessities, not of
sentiments. We, we Midlanders—the Professor and myself—want to know
what necessity requires the tolerance of a mere beverage which is so
liable to become a beastly nuisance.”
“Exactly so,” I said.
“I’ll tell you the necessity,” replied Willys. “And I’ll tell you,
too, that it goes far deeper than your economic theory. I return to
the Saturday nights of the workingman. You know, I know, everyone
with two grains of sense knows, that there is something desirous
in the inside of a man which even hard roads and baby bonds don’t
satisfy. That something is a primitive and profound need of our
elemental nature for excitement and every now and then for something
like intoxication. Why, my wife says,—excuse me, a lady with whom
I was formerly acquainted used to say,—‘No woman can get along on
less than a thrill a day,’ of one sort or another. It’s rooted in
the human organism—this hunger for occasional escape from humdrum.
‘Tedium’—what was it you said the other day, Professor? Rather
good, you know—‘tedium is three fourths of life.’ I agree with you
there, Professor; only I figure the tedious fraction is larger than
that, even for moderately contented and comfortable people. And
for the multitude, for the masses, the fraction that is not tedium
is almost negligible, when it is not positive pain. But—_but_, in
that microscopic fraction there must be a few moments or hours of
heightened consciousness, a burst of hilarity, a breath of freedom, a
little dream, a little edge of ecstasy—or a man will cut his throat
in order to feel that he is alive.”
“It is not done among the sort of people we associate with,” said
Cornelia, whom the argument impressed as rather silly.
“Perhaps not,” said Willys, “perhaps not. Perhaps you ‘escape’ in
some other fashion. But I say His Excellency is wrong in making light
of the poor man’s club. It’s his safety valve. Take the poor devil
to whom Saturday night has been the only bright spot in a black week.
Deny him beer, he drinks whiskey; deny him whiskey, he drinks vanilla
extract; if he can’t get vanilla extract, he takes to methyl alcohol;
or he falls back on drugs, and takes to theft and burglary, and
crimes of violence.”
“Aren’t you leaning rather heavily, Willys,” I said, “on what you
allege prohibition has done to the criminal classes? You can’t expect
repeal of prohibition in behalf of thieves and thugs.”
“As for the upper classes,” said Willys, “I won’t offend our hostess
by knowing anything that simply ‘isn’t done.’ But just consider what
every one knows: the Capuan character of the New York roof-garden;
the Corinthian style of current dancing; nice young girls at
petting-parties indistinguishable, actually indistinguishable in
costume and paint and manner from courtesans; the high spots that
can’t be kept out of movies; the chief interest in the novels we’re
reading and writing; and then the general domestic smash-up that is
following prohibition. There are worse things than a liquor license,
Professor, and we’ve got the whole pack of them on our backs by
putting in prohibition.”
I quoted my favorite passage from King Lear: “We make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains
of necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, drunkards, liars, and
adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all
that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.”
“Quite pat, Professor,” exclaimed Willys, whose wits are quick
enough. “And there is, by George, a divinity in it. I maintain it’s
the vengeance of Dionysus! We’ve tried to bind a god, and, by George,
he’s getting back at us. See what I mean? Have you read Euripides,
Excellency?”
“Once on a time,” Oliver said, “not lately. Tell us about it.”
“A great work—his _Bacchae_. Everybody ought to read it. You see,
there’s a reformer in Athens, called Pentheus, a straitlaced,
stiff-necked Puritan, an out-and-out prohibitionist, a—a regular
Mid-Western professor. Well, the young god—Dionysus, you know—comes
over into Greece from Asia with his choruses, singing and dancing
and swinging the ivy-wreathed thyrsus—and all that beautiful joyous
stuff, you know. But this Pentheus makes up his mind that Dionysus
is a bad lot, and he locks the god up in the stable—passes a sort
of Volstead Act on him, you understand. But he gets out—the god
gets out. Of course, he gets out; on the q.t. He escapes into the
hills—classical moonshine, classical bootlegging, you see. The women
get hold of the stuff and, up there in the hills, begin celebrating
‘mysteries’—all on the q.t. Attorney-General Pentheus says this must
be stopped—law must be enforced. He sleuths up into the hills to
spy them out. But the women, his own mother among them, catch him,
and literally pull him to pieces, tear him limb from limb and strew
the bloody fragments all over the place. That’s the vengeance of
Dionysus.”
“How perfectly horrid!” exclaimed Cornelia.
“You know the play, Professor,” said Willys, of course.
“Oh yes,” I replied, as if I had been intimate with it from infancy.
As a matter of fact, Oliver’s telegraphic reference to Bacchus had
prompted me to chuck Gilbert Murray’s little book on Euripides into
my traveling bag for train reading. That accident enabled me to
sustain my bluff by a bit of critical wisdom. “The play is curious,”
I said, “coming from Euripides. He passes for a progressive, an
intellectual radical. You would have expected him to sympathize with
Pentheus, of course. But I notice that Gilbert Murray doesn’t accept
the old theory that Euripides recanted and went back to the ancestral
gods.”
“Well,” replied Willys, “in that case, I think Gilbert Murray is
wrong—who is this Gilbert Murray? I’ve got the play here—in my
overcoat pocket—somebody or other’s translation, of course. You take
it with you, Professor, when you go. Read it again and tell me if you
don’t think I’m right.”
I had to laugh; and then we both explained how we happened to be
reading, or reading about, the _Bacchae_. Then Willys returned to his
argument.
“When I read this play, you know, it hit me in the eye that this
thing is as old as history. This prohibition idiocy is as old as the
race. If drinking could be rooted out, it would have been rooted out
long ago. All the arguments against it were cheesy in the days of
Noah. It sticks because, as His Excellency and I are pointing out, it
is rooted in necessity. You reformers, as you call yourselves, don’t
know what you are about. You’ve bit off what can’t be chewed. You are
attacking religion; and it’s dangerous business. You are trying to
kill a god, and it can’t be done.”
“But my dear Mr. Willys,” cried Cornelia, “it isn’t _our_ God. The
Church hasn’t really defined its position, and of course some of the
bishops are very liberal. But don’t the dissenters in this country
take a very firm stand in favor of prohibition? Most Americans are
dissenters, aren’t they? If so, then I should think you would call
prohibition itself a religious movement.”
“It has long been identified with the popular evangelical churches,”
I said.
“Don’t talk to me about the evangelical churches,” cried Willys.
“The ‘uplift’ has hit the churches till they are nothing but
community-improvement societies, with no more religion in them than
the municipal waterworks. There is no more real relation between
religion and prohibition than there is between signing the pledge and
seeing the Beatific Vision. Wine is as much a part of our traditional
religion as it was of the Greek religion. The Jews still drink their
Passover wine. Why shouldn’t they? What do you make of that passage
in the Old Testament about the winecup in the hand of God? What do
you make of the wine at the marriage feast in the New Testament? Or
the wine in the Holy Grail? Or the sacramental wine, drunk by all the
faithful, till the spirit of mystical fellowship evaporated in the
grape-juice of that paradox, the individual communion cup?”
“But it’s much more sanitary that way,” said Cornelia firmly, “really
much nicer. And since everyone knows that it’s only a beautiful old
form—”
“Oh, you formalists!” Willys ejaculated. “You formalists are the
real atheists. Till the days of frank atheism, we wished our friends
Godspeed, we pledged their healths, and we launched our ships with
a libation of wine. The central act of religious worship for two
thousand years was a kind of sacred intoxication in the blood of
the living God. Omit the central act, and religion disappears; and
all you’ve got left is a lot of unedifying bishops wrangling over
‘the higher criticism’ of fifty years ago. It’s the vengeance of the
Dionysiac element in Christianity overtaking them. I repeat what I
said before—It’s just as true of bishops as it is of workingmen:
human life can’t be sustained without a little edge of ecstasy. If we
try it, something will burst. That’s my forecast!”
“And your remedial measure—” said Oliver, “your remedy, rooted in the
necessities of the situation?”
“Why, moderate drinking, of course,” replied the novelist, lapsing
into the wide arms of the chair, like one from whom all the virtue
has departed. “Teach Americans to drink as the Greeks drink to-day:
wine everywhere, no one drunk.”
“Not a bad idea,” chuckled His Excellency.
“An idea of quite startling originality,” I added.
“Our ‘dry battery’ is crackling with suppressed thunderbolts,” said
Oliver. “But”—he glanced at his watch—“it lacks only ten minutes
of midnight and the dawn of a better era for the world. While the
inhabitants of this borough of Manhattan are meditating on their
sins of the past year, and signifying repentance by various acts of
atonement, it is fitting that we should not let the hour pass without
some appropriate ceremony. Professor, you haven’t seen my new set of
Casanova—a Christmas gift from the wittiest of my French friends. Let
me show it to you. Willys admires it immensely.”
Willys and I followed our host to his bookshelves, while Cornelia
idly turned the pages of the new _American Mercury_. But why go into
details? Oliver’s edition of the _Mémoires_, handsomely bound in full
morocco and locked in a glass case, proved to be the mask of His
Excellency’s “diplomatic reserve.” From the ingredients of two or
three “volumes” he compounded something which he told us was known
in Washington as the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” because it agreed with
gentlemen.
As the clock and the bells and the whistles sounded the knell of
1923, Oliver exclaimed, “Why, Cornelia, where’s the Professor’s
buttermilk,” and he and Willys clinked glasses, and drank “To the
vengeance of Dionysus!”
V
I EXPLAIN THE POSITION OF CÆSAR’S WIVES
“And now,” said His Excellency, stroking his silvered brown beard
and turning upon me the raillery of his dynamic dark eyes, “it’s
up to you, Professor. You’ve been sitting here like one of Uncle
Sam’s ‘observers’ at a peace conference—a chiel a-takin’ notes,
an’ sayin’ nuthin’. Don’t you know that henceforth there shall be
no more neutrals? You are our only representative of the great
drouthy forward-looking West. Don’t you know that the business of
a representative is to represent? The wife of my bosom is on the
fence—a friendly noncombatant, as is proper to her sex. But Willys
and I have got you backed into a corner. I’ve shown the economic
necessity of prohibition. Willys has shown the religious necessity of
drink. What is the Mid-West going to do about it? Which way are you
going to break? Break, Professor! But stick, as we have done, to the
necessities of the case.”
“I am as much a necessitarian as you are, Excellency,” I said.
“You’d better be,” chuckled Oliver. “Cæsar’s wives, I suspect, had
better be necessitarians.”
“But I am as religious as Willys,” I added.
“That’s very right,” said Willys.
“And so,” I continued, “I shall take a middle ground.”
“I see,” said Oliver, “the golden mean, or temperance. Too little
temperance is chronic inebriety. Too much temperance is teetotalism.
Prohibition may and must be defended as the only known means to
insure moderate drinking among the better sort of people. Exactly my
position!”
“No, Excellency,” I said, “you don’t see. Mine is not exactly your
position. I take the middle position according to a precept of
Pascal: I seize upon both extremes and occupy all the ground between.
But my extremes are not yours. The extremes which I have in mind
are your economic necessitarianism and Willys’s religion—his theory
of the necessity of religious excitement. I lay hold of both those
positions as firmly as you and Willys; but I reconcile them, instead
of making them mutually destructive. Starting from the same premises,
I reach a different conclusion.”
“Of course,” said Oliver, “of course. But what is it?”
“Before I state it,” I said, “may I, since I am on the defensive,
take a minute to rebut your fallacies and to present, as you and
Willys have done, my more intimate personal feeling and private point
of view?”
“Oh, yes,” murmured Willys, rather sleepily, “that will be very
proper.”
“It will be good for you, Willys,” I said. “I shall not hurt you more
than is necessary. And I shall not be half so tedious as I might be
if I were not leaving town on the 2.37. Relief is in sight; my taxi
will be here at one.”
“At one?” said Cornelia. “The children promised to be home by one, or
earlier. Oliver, couldn’t you all—”
“Why certainly,” Oliver said. “Send away your taxi, Professor. When
the Infant comes in with the car, we’ll drive you to the station, and
then I’ll take Willys to his hostelry. But go ahead now, Professor,
with your personal narrative of the great drouth in the Mojave
Desert.”
“It’s the first forty years without water that’s hardest,” I said.
“After that, one gets on nicely. Do you know that, far from being
keen for this argument, the entire subject bored me terribly, till
you and Willys drenched it again in—in reality. Since my student days
a generation ago, I have hardly even seen liquor enough of all sorts
to float an old-fashioned alumni reunion for a single evening. A
resident during the latter half of my life in a bone-dry district, I,
like most of my neighbors, view the annual extension of the dry lands
with the aloofest academic interest.”
“Of course!” said Oliver, smiling, “of course! But you can abridge
that; we all know the quality of a professor’s interest in any matter
of first-rate importance.”
“It was not till bootleggers were commonly reported to be as
ubiquitous as German spies in wartime,” I resumed, “and men began to
attribute all the evils of the hour to prohibition, and seriously to
argue that the Volstead Act was forcing drunkenness and criminality
upon numberless respectable citizens who thitherto had led lives
of unblemished virtue—it was not till then that I began to feel a
certain curiosity about the facts, and especially about the mental
condition of intelligent and responsible people resident in territory
which is still subterraneously wet.”
“Their mental condition, Professor?” Oliver inquired. “Why, pray,
their mental condition?”
“Because I couldn’t understand, Excellency,” I replied, “how
intelligent men like you and Willys, who have lived abroad, could
permit yourselves to attribute the sexually hectic flush of recent
literature and life in America to the Volstead Act. All these evils,
says Willys, followed prohibition, and he wags his head and mutters,
‘Vengeance of Dionysus.’ Suppose, now, I seize the same absurd
_post-hoc-propter-hoc_ principles and attribute the virginal chastity
of French, Italian, and English fiction and private life to the free
use of intoxicating beverages?”
“I smell irony, Professor, somewhere,” said Oliver, “but I grant you
that Willys’s logic slipped a cog there. We’ll have to grant you that
America dry is no more sex-obsessed than Europe wet.”
“And then,” I went on, “I was a little troubled by Willys’s plea
that, with the general decline of drinking in America, something of
real poetic beauty is passing out of our lives. I honestly can’t
feel that he speaks realistically about that. I know the Anacreontic
tradition, the literary romance of nut-brown ale and blood-red wine,
perhaps as well as Willys does, and in the bookish imagination
of youth used myself to revel with those that ‘gloried and drank
deep.’ Used to spout, you know, about ‘Bairam, that great hunter,’
and the ‘sons of Ben’ at the Mermaid, and so on. But when I had
an opportunity to compare the Bacchic frenzy of an ancient Greek
or Persian or Elizabethan, as represented by the poets, with the
Bacchic frenzy of an American citizen howling drunk—I declare, it
was one of the major disillusions of my life. The actual beauty of
the real thing has come at last to impress me as very nebulous, like
the amours of Thomas the Rhymer with the queen of the fairies. The
lover is too often left ‘alone and palely loitering,’ with a crumpled
shirt-front, with his hat in the gutter, by a green lamp-post—‘where
no birds sing.’”
“Oh, green grapes!” stuttered Willys. “What can you make of green
grapes! What can you know about it, Professor? On your own showing
it’s twenty years since—”
“True, Willys,” I replied, “true. But the pathos of distance ought
to lend a glamour to one’s memories. One has, you know, one’s
memories. Even a Mid-Western professor has his memories; and in the
deep interval of twenty years all that is ugly in them should have
faded out, should have been gathered into the blue mist of oblivion,
leaving the soft contours of the Bacchic landscape bathed in pure
beauty. I don’t find it so. I see—”
I hesitated. In a company like this, it is a bit awkward to talk on
the killjoy side of a question. But Oliver rallied me forward.
“Tell us what you see. Professor,” he said. “Life or death, give us
only reality. Show us the sad pictures in the prohibitionist gallery
of disillusion. We’ll try to look interested.”
“Well,” I said, “Willys’s praise of this beautiful old custom of
getting drunk now and then did press a button in my gallery of
memories and light up a few old pictures. They are relevant only
because I did have, in my earlier years, about the average American’s
chance to feel the æsthetic value of this vanishing phase of our
popular culture. I see pictures. As Whitman says, ‘The shapes arise.’”
“Whitman was a priest of Dionysus,” said Willys.
“So was Emerson,” I said, “and so, according to my lights, am I. The
shapes arise. I see a strayed reveler, with no vine leaves in his
hair,—only a shirt, trousers, and suspenders,—lying on his back,
and shouting children towing him by a rope attached to his foot,
through the main streets of an Arizona town; the reveler grins and
plucks feebly at the rope and says, ‘Now, boys!’ This picture is
thirty years old. I see a driveling swaying figure in a crowd at a
street corner in Los Angeles, trying to give away the contents of his
pocketbook. I see a Vermont farmer in his haymow, surly and maudlin
with the unfreezable alcoholic element of frozen apple-cider; he jabs
his cow with the tines of his hayfork. Returning from a mountain camp
at midnight to a Massachusetts village, I see in the road before me a
dim mass reeling through the moonlight and entering a cottage in the
outskirts, and two minutes later I hear a woman’s voice shrieking,
‘Murder! murder! murder!’”
“Yes,” yawned His Excellency, “I have always insisted that the
peasantry and the proletariat were nasty in their liquor—serves them
right to lose it.”
“Don’t interrupt my vision,” I said. “The shapes arise. I see in
a New England city a trolley car full of sick college students
scrambling for the rear platform—one of them lies at full length
in the passage; he is a little trampled. I see a fellow student
regularly soaking his shredded-wheat biscuit in whiskey; he carries
his flask to morning chapel. I see another, stepping—without vine
leaves—into the open shaft of an elevator; no god bears him up. I see
other youths of the better sort in large numbers in a smoke-heavy
place of midnight refreshment, after a football victory, treating to
hot whiskey weary-looking painted girls in black—Stephen Phillips’s
‘disillusioned women sipping fire.’ I see five professional men on
a moral holiday, seriously approaching the task of consuming three
quarts of Scotch and Bourbon before morning. I see groggy alumni
embracing one another in tears, hugely pleased to be drunk with men
to whom they never speak when they are sober. I see derelict artists
and novelists and lawyers, quietly slipping away from professional
life to settle down in a rustic hermitage to drink themselves to
death. I see a group of permanent class-secretaries in secret
session, running through the long list of alumni in every college who
never report and never turn up; the secretaries know why, but they
publish no report.”
“Good heavens, Professor,” groaned Willys, “His Excellency and I were
not born yesterday, and doubtless even our hostess knows there are
some casualties. Whiskey isn’t buttermilk. Knives have edges, and are
dangerous. Everything that’s good for anything is dangerous. But
really now, what is the point of all this?”
“It has a point,” I replied; “it has a point at both ends. It
bristles with points; and all of them are dangerous to you and your
remedy for our discontents—your moderate drinking. The first point
is this: that customary drinking in America, whatever it may be
in Greece, has been and is, on the whole, not beautiful but ugly,
disgusting, and destructive. The second point is this: that customary
drinking in America is so inveterately intemperate that your
proposal to institute a custom of temperate drinking is really far
more visionary and impractical than prohibition. Your remedy is not
conceived with an eye to the essential facts in the case.”
“And these are—” prompted His Excellency.
“These are,” I said, “that Americans of both upper and lower classes
are temperamentally hard to stop when they are started. Ninety out
of every hundred Americans feel a curious pride in ‘seeing the
whole show’; in ‘going the whole hog’; in ‘sticking the thing out’;
in ‘going the limit’; in ‘getting results’; and in ‘getting there
first.’ This temperament shows in their drinking as in everything
else. They care nothing for taste or ‘bouquet.’ They value their
liquor in proportion to the quickness of the ‘kick.’ ‘I can let the
stuff alone,’ they say, ‘but when it speaks to me, I want it to speak
with some authority.’”
“The first really sensible thing you’ve said this evening,” said the
novelist.
I was tempted to mention his perfectly callous consumption of
Oliver’s choice Spanish wine as a case in point; but I restrained
myself and said:—
“A Frenchman sits down at a table on the boulevard with a single
small glass of light wine; and sips, and rolls it under his tongue;
and sips, and studies a cloud in the sky; and sips, and holds the
glass up to the light; and sips, and looks at the river, and quotes
a couple of verses of Ronsard; and sips, and considers what he was
doing in April a year ago; and lifts the glass, and puts it down,
and counts his change; and so on for half an hour or an hour; while
the Yankee traveler at the next table selects a bottle of the most
expensive wine on the list, gulps it down like ice-water, and sighs
for a good American cocktail. We were born whiskey-drinkers, high and
low, men and women.”
“I adore wine, but I abominate the taste of whiskey,” said Cornelia.
His Excellency relieved me of the obvious duty of saying that her
taste in that, as in all things, is exceptional.
“The Professor,” he continued, “overdraws it a little; but there is
much in what he says. Historically considered, we have, as a people,
rather taken to extremes: George III or pure democracy; abolition
or a thousand niggers; the book of Genesis or Robert Ingersoll;
for better, for worse till death do us part, or Brigham Young and
his twenty-eight wives; the town wide-open or the town bone-dry;
milk-shake or whiskey neat. It hangs together. You’ll have to admit,
Willys, that moderate as you and I are, as a people we insist on
going in for a kick. It’s rooted in what you yourself called the
primitive and profound necessities of our national temper.”
“It’s rooted,” said Willys, “in the artificial necessities created
by our national puritanism. It’s rooted in the artificial necessity
of being ashamed to drink at home, and having to live, like a false
little Sunday-School god, in the eyes of a sanctified wife and
puritanized children.”
“Really, Mr. Willys!” Cornelia exclaimed.
“It’s the truth,” insisted the novelist. “It is rooted in the
necessity thrust upon a poor devil by the surrender of public
opinion to the prohibition bullies—the necessity of carrying a
portable kick in his hip pocket, or, in the old days, of standing up
with his foot on the rail and taking it quick and getting out before
his neighbor—came in for his.”
“No, cynic,” I said, “it is rooted in a deeper necessity than
that—and a real one, which can’t be essentially changed. I mean, that
our national custom of whiskey-drinking was rooted, like all bad
things,—according to His Excellency,—in the Mid-West, rooted through
a thousand miles of the richest corn-land in the world. Do you know
that if the Atlantic Ocean were pumped dry and we Mid-Westerners
applied our resources to it, we could fill the basin with corn
whiskey every year? That is the real reason why a kick-loving people
would, in America, always be a whiskey-drinking people. And that is
one of the reasons why we Mid-Westerners have maturely decided to
feed our corn to hogs.”
“A-ha!” cried Oliver. “Striking into your argument at last! Economic
theory of morals! My argument! I ‘get’ you, as you Midlanders say.”
“Yes, Excellency,” I assented, “you get me very well. As a ‘friend
of the plain people,’ you get me very well. I accept the whole of
your economic argument for the necessity of prohibition. I accept
every word that you say on the expensiveness of the reconstructed
workman’s club, on the expensiveness of his wife’s post-bellum
tastes, of the long future in which we may expect high wages, of the
continued necessity for maximum production. But you hardly scratched
the surface of the argument. You have hardly glimpsed the expanding
expensiveness which the average life in America is soon going to
exhibit. We are headed straight and hard for an era of broad,
inclusive, expensive popular culture. The plain people, whom we’ve
been feeding for a hundred years on the skim-milk and fragments of
old morality and religion, are developing an appetite for comfort, for
health, for knowledge, for recreation, for variegated pleasure, for
style, for art, and for beauty, which is the most expensive thing
in the world. Prohibition—and the average man knows this, even the
moderately intelligent workman knows this—prohibition has its tap
root of necessity in the imperative choice of our entire society
between ‘booze’ on the one hand, and, on the other, beauty, art,
style, pleasure, knowledge, health, and comfort—which he knows,
and you know, are the real tangible substance of modern upper-class
religion.”
“Oho!” cried Willys. “Getting around to my argument at last. But it
doesn’t sound much like what I mean by religion.”
“Religion!” cried Cornelia. “Why, it isn’t religion at all!”
“What is religion, my dear Cornelia?” I asked.
“Why, religion,” she replied, “is what the bishops agree are the
fundamental teachings of the Church.”
“It is not!” I retorted, with the intimate discourtesy and dogmatism
of an old friend who is also an old puritan. “My dear Cornelia,” I
hastened to add, “that is theology—not religion.”
“Tell Cornelia,” said Oliver,—whom the high Anglican tendencies of
his wife rather amuse,—“tell Cornelia, Professor, what religion is.”
“Your religion,” I responded, “is what you actually believe in,
whatever that is. My religion is what I actually believe in, whatever
it is. The religion of the average American is what he actually
believes in, whatever it is. What do you actually believe in,
Cornelia?”
“I believe,” she replied firmly, “in the Apostolic Church, in the
communion of saints—”
“His Excellency, for example, among them?” suggested Willys, saucily
enough.
“Really, Mr. Willys!” said Cornelia. I felt the air cold on my cheek.
I doubt if it lowered the temperature of Willys. He merely said, “I
am a realist,” and lapsed again.
Cornelia repeated, “I believe in the Apostolic Church—,” and this
time I interrupted.
“The average American,” I said, “does not—at least, he does not
believe in it with any such fullness of faith as he accords to
baseball.”
“The tone of this conversation is becoming decidedly distasteful
to me,” said Cornelia. She picked up a copy of _Vogue_ and buried
herself in it, pretending to lose all her interest in our discussion.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I too, like Willys, am a realist. I have
learned much from the master realists of my time—I mean the salesmen.
I have learned, when I wish to make a religious appeal to man, to
appeal to him on the basis of the things in which he really believes.
If a man’s real belief is small and mean, you’ve got to begin mean
and small. If he believes only in his pocketbook, I must appeal to
his pocketbook. If he believes in his children, I can appeal to him
through his children.”
“Excuse me,” said Cornelia, rising, “it’s nearly time for the
children to come home. I will telephone down to the office to have
them send away your taxi.” When she returned from giving the message
at Oliver’s desk-telephone, she picked up her _Vogue_ again, and
seated herself outside our circle, near the tall windows looking on
the street. We readjusted our positions by the fire so that our backs
should not be turned to her, and I continued:—
“The real business of religion is to reconcile us to our necessities.
According to the powerful drive of Oliver’s economic argument,
the outstanding necessity to which the average American has now
got to be reconciled, is prohibition. That is a rather hard
selling-proposition. I don’t think it can be put over except under
pressure of some sustained religious emotion, or as Willys calls it,
‘excitement.’ Now don’t you see how important it is to know what the
average American sustains a religious emotion about—what he really
does believe in?”
“Yes, that’s all right,” said His Excellency. “What next?”
“Well,” I said, “if the average American registers no emotion about
the Apostolic Church, we can’t use that in a case like this, can we?
We’ve got to fall back on our really common bonds of union—like our
common belief in modern plumbing, health, youth, the athletic life,
education, publicity, automobiling.”
“Popular elements, anyway,” said Willys. “Automobiling as a
substitute for which of the Thirty-nine Articles, Professor?” I
glanced to see if Cornelia were listening; but she was plucking at a
holly wreath in the window and seemed intent on the street.
“It is a vital element of our popular religion,” I insisted, “and by
no means so absurd a substitute as you suppose. One has got to take
together, you see, this whole group of genuine popular beliefs. Next
one asks every honest average man if he doesn’t agree that these
things are what he wants and believes in, and that the group of them
expresses what our modern civilization wants and believes in. Then
one turns on the average man and says: ‘This, sir, is your effective
Shorter Catechism; and you’ve got to junk whiskey as your national
drink, because it is just flatly incompatible with the general
distribution of the objects of your religion.’ That’s the way his
religion reconciles him to his necessity.”
“I had a hunch, Professor,” said Willys, who had long since grown
weary of serious argument, “that automobiling and drinking went
together.”
“They have hitherto,” I said, “but—”
VI
I DISCUSS THE ETHICS OF AN AUTOMOBILING CIVILIZATION
My speech was cut short at that point by Cornelia at the window,
calling out rather sharply:—
“Oliver, why do you suppose the children don’t come?” Almost in the
same breath she sprang to her feet and, pulling aside the curtain,
cried:—
“Oh! Oh! Oliver, what’s that?” And an instant later, “Oh! Oh! Oh! How
dreadful! Thank God! Thank God! Oh, thank God, it’s not the children!”
“Of course not!” soothed Oliver, with his arm about her shoulder. “Of
course not. What was it? Tell us about it.”
We ourselves had heard, not indistinctly,—the apartment is on
the second floor,—the prolonged steady screech of an automobile
horn, and, in response to Cornelia’s cry, had rushed to her side,
expecting, I suppose, to see the fire department clearing its right
of way up the avenue.
“Oh, there’s been a dreadful accident,” cried Cornelia. “That
poor little boy—Oh, that poor little boy! They were driving like
mad—to the hospital, I suppose. I saw two policemen standing on
the running-board of an open car coming up the street, and another
sitting on the front seat by the driver. Then, for just an instant,
as it flashed into the bright light under the windows, I could
see that the policeman in front was holding in his arms a little
boy—seven or eight years old—with his head, face upward, hanging over
the edge of the car—bright red with blood—absolutely one bright red
disc of blood—and streaming. Oh, it was horrible! You have no idea
how horrible! And then, as it went past, I could see that there was a
woman crumpled over in the rear seat, and an old man trying to hold
her up.”
“It must have been a shock,” Willys offered; and I added something
equally helpful, as one does on such occasions.
“Well, my dear,” said Oliver, as we returned to the fireplace,
“accidents, you know, do happen. Are you calmer now?”
“Yes,” said Cornelia, “yes, I guess so. I’m trembling still. You’ve
simply no idea how it shook me.”
She sank into a chair, then recovered herself sharply, and said with
a smile: “I’m sorry. Forgive me for making such a fuss over it. I’m
all right now. I suppose it’s horrid to be so selfish—but, oh,
Oliver, aren’t you glad it wasn’t the children? Aren’t you?”
“Certainly, my dear!” said Oliver, in such a droll matter-of-fact
tone that we all laughed quite spontaneously. “And now shall we talk
of something else? Or do you wish me to telephone to the Infant that
their mother has been anxiously expecting them for at least five
minutes?”
“No, don’t telephone,” Cornelia protested. “It’s really only
just after one. I’m sure they will be here in plenty of time for
the train. And please don’t change the subject. I heard what you
were saying. You were talking about automobiles and automobile
accidents. That is what made me so ‘jumpy,’ I suppose. I’ll not be
silly any more. What were you going to say about automobiles when I
interrupted?”
“It would be hard,” I said, “to avoid ‘improving the occasion’ a
little. Heaven knows I didn’t get up the accident to illustrate my
argument—and there’s no reason to suppose that it does illustrate my
argument exactly. These people may all have been perfectly sober.
But if this thing, just now, had happened in a story, like that, we
should have felt that it was contrived and artificial—I don’t recall
just where I stopped, but what I was about to say was—the gist of
it was, that you can make a live argument based on our automobiling
civilization, with almost anybody in the United States, because
almost everybody in the United States has some sort of vital interest
in a car; and so the argument, as we say, comes home to him.”
“That is sound enough,” said Oliver.
“Yes,” I said, “the things that people have in common are the things
that hold them together and enable them to act together. Cars are a
much more expensive cultural and social amalgam than, say, abstract
fraternity, or a belief in the Apostolic Church, or even than an
old family Bible. But the fact remains that cars are at present
far more widely diffused and almost infinitely more used among our
fellow countrymen than any of the older and less expensive amalgams.
I doubt whether there is any other subject whatever upon which our
people possess so large a fund of common knowledge and experience.
Consider: we have fifteen million cars. That means that perhaps one
out of every six or seven men, women, children, and babies in this
country actually drives a car. That’s what I call practical belief in
an article of the popular religion. And you see—if you think—that
it’s the garage and the filling-station that crowd out the saloon,
at every few blocks in the city, in every town and village, at every
crossroads from Florida to Montana. It’s one—just one, mind you—of
the expensive new clubs of the plain people, of the average man.”
“Yes,” said Oliver, “there’s something in that.”
“There’s a good deal in that,” I persisted, “both for economic
necessitarians like you and me, and for religious enthusiasts like
Willys. For Willys, you remember, the essence of religion is a kind
of dangerous and exciting Bacchic escape from humdrum into a few
hours of heightened consciousness and mystical fellowship—through the
national drink. Well, Willys, when the half gods go, the true gods
arrive. The national car does everything that _you_ ask of the Holy
Grail: it provides the average American with an emotional discharge;
it provides him with danger, excitement, the intoxication of speed,
heightened consciousness, and a mystical sense of fellowship with
the owner of both the Rolls-Royce and the Ford roadster; and it
provides these things not on Saturday night only but every day in the
year. As you will concede, there is a ‘kick’, the possibility of a
kick—especially in our national car—for every day in the year. And
there’s one more thing about the religion and ritual of the car.”
“Oh at least that!” said Oliver. “But what is it, Professor?”
“It’s a thing,” I said, “that knocks into a cocked hat His
Excellency’s private argument for privately nullifying the Eighteenth
Amendment. Of course His Excellency didn’t invent the argument—I mean
that hoary old bore about personal liberty and private conscience
and so forth. All the ‘wet’ newspapers pull it out of the Pyramid
of Cheops seven times a week. All the ‘wet’ city newspapers count
the German and Italian and Slavic noses in their constituencies and
then get off that tedious drip about the ‘puritan minority’ and its
attempt to bully these honest European consciences, which, being
European, are free from sanctimonious scruples against befuddling
their wits with liquor.”
“_Quo me rapis, tui plenum_—where, O Mid-Western Bacchus,” cried
Oliver, “where dost thou drag me at the tail of thy car? I feel the
thong going through my heels and the rope running up to the axle of
your Ford. Crank up! Drag on!”
“Why, don’t you see, Excellency,” I persisted, “that the car hauls
the whole argument clean out of the gumbo of ‘personal liberty’—clean
out of the slough of ‘private conscience’? We don’t know how this
accident out here in the street took place; but in our Mid-Western
metropolis we killed some seven hundred people last year with cars,
and, according to the papers, there was more than one such accident
as this one from drivers who were drunk. With one out of every seven
men, women, children, and babies in the United States driving a car
at from twenty to forty miles an hour, along crowded streets and
thoroughfares from Maine to California, we have simply got to prevent
drivers from being drunk. It’s in the necessity of the situation. We
are all private engineers nowadays. That’s what we want. Very well.
If we all want to be private engineers, we’ve got to submit to the
same regulations as governed—long since—engineers on the railways.
Our job is not less hazardous than theirs, but more so. A railway
engineer who drinks is fired by the railroad, and I understand by his
own union.”
“I’m stiff on that,” said His Excellency. “A man who drives his car
when he’s drunk should be strung up to the nearest telegraph pole.”
“Oh no,” said Willys, “you’re a little hard on him. You can’t stop a
man drinking because he occasionally drives his car, drunk. Give him
a good fine and take away his license. Or, if he is very drunk, put
him where he can sober up.”
“That wouldn’t,” I said, “quite straighten things out—would it—for
the occupants of the car that went by here?”
“Oh, but Professor, you are so unrealistic,” said Willys, as he rose
and clapped a hand over his mouth in order to eject a yawn which he
could not swallow. “You are hopelessly unrealistic. If a man doesn’t
drive when he’s drunk, now and then, how in the dickens is he going
to get home? What time is it?”
“It’s half-past one,” said Cornelia, who had also risen at the
first opportunity. “And there’s the telephone. See what it is,
Oliver—quickly, quickly! But nothing could have happened to them—my
son is such a careful driver.”
VII
THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS
Oliver stepped to his desk and removed the receiver. There was an
inevitable moment of suspense. Then tossing to us with a smile: “It’s
the Infant—they’re all right,” he turned again to the telephone
and listened for nearly five minutes, during which he said “yes”
several times, “What’s that?” once, and concluded with “I’ll come
immediately.”
Then he faced us with a curious smile, meant to be reassuring, and,
with that promptitude of thought and action which idle Americans in
Europe are understood to exhibit on the outbreak of war, said swiftly
and decisively:—
“Oliver has been arrested for speeding. I’ll have to go and bail him
out. They are letting the girls come home. They will be here any
minute. Willys, will you go downstairs to the office and tell them
to send a taxi here at once? Professor, you go, too, and meet the
girls downstairs. I want to have a word with Cornelia. If Dorothy
comes before I join you, keep her there a minute. Yes, put on your
coats—we’ll not come back. Willys and I will look after this
business; the Professor will go on, to his train.”
In the face of a real little emergency Cornelia’s nerves never betray
her. As soon as Oliver began to give orders, she became the source
instead of the recipient of reassurances, as if her only anxiety had
been for a gracious leave-taking. She did it extraordinarily well.
* * * * *
The rest of my impressions of that night I shall drastically
telescope because this is not a story, but a conversation, and my
impressions relate merely to the incident which had intruded with
such coincidental force upon the conversation.
I recall that the first moment in which my imagination began to
link the talk and events of the evening vividly together was in the
elevator, descending to the ground floor, when Willys, casually
thrusting his hands into the pockets of his overcoat, and muttering
something about His Excellency’s being a little fussed, fished out
his copy of the _Bacchae_. As I transferred the book to my own coat,
somehow association shot a link from the Greek tragedy and its gory
scene in the hills to the red face that Cornelia had seen under the
city lamps.
While Willys occupied himself with accelerating the arrival of
a taxi, I went out on the street and stood on the curb, waiting
reflectively enough for the appearance of Dorothy and her girl
friend. Five minutes later they were driven up. With the notion
that my function was to shut off a “scene” of any sort, I instantly
remarked, in the quiet tone of a man who understands all about the
situation, that Dorothy’s father was explaining the thing to her
mother, who was a little agitated, and that he desired them to wait
downstairs till he came down. Both girls looked as if they had been
crying, but they were calm now, and seemed indisposed to talk to me.
When I had drawn them aside out of observation from the office, and
saw no hysterical signs, I ventured to ask why they had been driving
so fast. The other girl, whose name I did not catch, said that they
had not been driving fast but had skidded. Before I could utter my
natural question, Dorothy turned on her young friend, and said:—
“That is not so. You know it is not so.” Then she did a queer thing.
She asked me if I was leaving town that night, and when I said I was,
she slipped from under her fur coat a small, light oblong parcel
wrapped in a man’s handkerchief, thrust it into my hands, and
whispered with singular intensity: “Take it with you, please! Take it
away and pitch it—pitch it where no one will ever find it!” I dropped
it discreetly into my overcoat pocket. Then Oliver entered from the
elevator, questioned Dorothy for a minute, and sent the two girls up
to Cornelia.
Oliver, Willys, and I then entered the waiting taxi and drove
away. Oliver sat with his back to the driver, facing us two. I
itched to ask him why the other girl had told me that their car
had skidded, and why Dorothy had denied it. But it seemed a good
time to let Oliver speak first. He sat for a few moments in a
frowning concentration, almost as if we had not been there. Then he
ejaculated, still as if we had not been there, “My God, what a mess!
My God, what a mess!” Willys rallied him on making such an ado over a
fine. Then Oliver hurled the whole thing between our eyes, just as he
himself had got it, standing there so gaily in the library, smiling
histrionically back at us from the telephone. The Infant—he still
referred to him as “the Infant”— had been arrested on the charge of
manslaughter and driving a car while drunk. He wasn’t drunk, but he
had been drinking a little at the party, as the other boys had. He
had somehow lost control and hit some people, a woman and a little
boy, he thought, just a few blocks from home.
Well, that is the gist of the incident.
As I look back now on that trip to the police-station, I am shocked
to remember how self-centred we were, all three. I can’t recall
that it occurred to any one of us to be concerned about the load of
broken humanity that had gone, an hour earlier, to the hospital. Our
sole concern seemed to be lest a couple of physically uninjured boys
should spend a few hours of the night in jail. And just before the
taxi stopped at the police-station to let His Excellency and Willys
out, I know that I myself was actually wondering about this remote
point: how it would affect Cornelia, and whether she would not suffer
more in the injury which her son had inflicted upon others than if he
had himself been injured. But what I was actually saying was, that I
thought young Oliver did not drink; Cornelia seemed so sure of him.
Oliver Senior exclaimed “Oh rot!” And then he added:—
“Why, the Infant and the furnace-man made a keg of raisin wine in the
basement of our own apartment last Easter. He told me about it just
yesterday. I asked him why he hadn’t told me at the time, since we
two were on the square with each other. He said that he was afraid of
setting me a bad example! Oh, the poor little devil! The poor little
devil!”
Willys said it was “a damn shame” and they must see what they could
do to get the charge of driving while drunk withdrawn and the charge
of exceeding the speed limit substituted. Then we shook hands. Oliver
and Willys got out, and I went on to the railway station. I hated not
to stand by and see the thing through. But Oliver had assured me that
I couldn’t really do anything _but_ stand by; and as I had a speaking
engagement in Ohio on the next day, and my college work began the day
after, I surrendered to the necessity of the situation. My holiday
was over.
I started westward with little eagerness—with an odd sensation of
repletion and fatigue mixed with cerebral excitement. “The starved
silkworm,” I muttered to myself, “has had his feast of mulberry
leaves.” I was not sleepy and didn’t wish to spend the small hours of
the morning tossing in my berth. I went into the empty dressing-room
for a smoke. As I hung up my overcoat, I thought of the parcel
that Dorothy had entreated me to “pitch—pitch where no one will
ever find it.” Poor pathetic, distracted little Dorothy! It was
only an empty silver flask, wrapped in her brother’s handkerchief
and neatly engraved with his monogram. Poor little distracted
Bacchante—apparently it hadn’t occurred to her that the breath of
whiskey still strong in the silver flask was doubtless giving even
stronger evidence elsewhere.
The thing hurt me, and I put it away. Everything that I tried
to think of, however, hurt me. I wanted to escape from too much
sensation. But my mind was in that state of fatigue-intoxication in
which one seems to be simply an observer of a succession of pictures
which form spontaneously there. I was conscious of wishing to reflect
consecutively on a certain idea, namely, whether Willys was right in
declaring that one can’t kill a god. But the moment that I began to
grip the idea, and ask myself whether in the course of history many
terrible old gods and dynasties of gods had not utterly passed away
under the pressure of that Necessity which encompasses the gods and
is stronger than they—pictures began to form: Bacchanalian women
dancing in the hills; Willys’s humorous torn limbs of Pentheus
strewn “all over the place”; Cornelia’s terrified picture of the
gory head hanging over the car; and—the young Bacchus at the police
station.
Sometimes one manages to escape from the persecution of such pictures
by reading a book. I had nothing available but the copy of the
_Bacchae_ that Willys had lent me. When I found it impossible to
escape from its suggestions, I decided to face them. I read till the
gray morning crept into the car and extinguished the lights. The
last lines of the tragedy moved me deeply, with a kind of strange
solemnity, a haunting beauty.
O the works of the Gods—in manifold wise they reveal them:
Manifold things unhoped-for the Gods to accomplishment bring,
And the things that we looked for, the Gods deign not to fulfill them;
And the paths undiscerned of our eyes, the Gods unseal them.
I looked out at the window. Another day had come. We were thundering
through wintry cornfields—a hint of snow on the withered brown
stalks. I rose, and passing through the silent sleepers to the
deserted observation-car at the rear, I went out on the platform
and pitched the empty silver flask as far as I could pitch it into
the wind. I seemed to hear from the corn a remembered godlike voice
crying: “O celestial Bacchus, drive them mad!”
BOOK FIVE
APPROACHING RELIGION AND OTHER GRAVE MATTERS
I
WE MEET IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
It is not my intention to make public, in any detail, what I know
of the means by which His Excellency got young Oliver out of his
New Year’s scrape in New York. In recording my conversations with
Cornelia and her family, I have been animated throughout by a desire
to increase popular respect for the members of our upper class as the
suitable persons to give tone to the democracy; and this particular
incident happens not to be altogether creditable to the ethical sense
of His Excellency—if one uses as a criterion the ethical austerity of
Jeanie Deans or George Washington of blessed memory. I am not sure
that almost any other man in the same circumstances—even a member of
our very moral middle-class—would not have strained a point to keep
his own son from public punishment and disgrace. I mean only that we
all talk about “equality before the law,” until we find ourselves in
personal need of special privileges; and that when His Excellency’s
withers were wrung, he took it as a matter of course that he should
use his money and his persuasive tongue, his acquaintance with the
police captain, his relationship with Judge Black, and his influence
with the newspapers to smooth things over. The matter was adjusted
out of court and without publicity, chiefly by the prepayment,
while the recovery of the principal victim was in doubt, of the
moderate sum which disinterested persons estimated the life of an
eight-year-old boy of the laboring class to be worth. His Excellency
himself wrote to me, in the latter part of March, as I remember, that
everything had been “fixed up—_Gott sei Dank_; so that’s over.”
What immediate effect the accident and the reparation of it had upon
the internal harmony of Cornelia’s household, I did not know. In the
occasional letters which I had received from her early in the year,
she expressed considerable anxiety about the health of her son.
She said that the accident was preying on his mind and making him
nervous and listless about his school work—and perhaps she should
have to take him out of school. In one letter, which she asked me to
burn, I thought that I detected a hint of bitterness toward Oliver
for concealing from her his knowledge that Oliver Junior had been
less innocent of the tastes and follies of his age than she had
imagined him to be. But in all the years of our acquaintance, both
she and her husband had maintained a proud and—I had supposed—happy
reticence regarding their more intimate relations; and except in the
essentially comic incident, last summer, of Dorothy’s bobbed hair, I
had never been admitted to so much as a glimpse of anything like a
domestic “difference.” Being, myself, an old bachelor with perhaps
somewhat idealistic notions of family life, it was quite beyond me
to conceive that a serious misfortune, like the automobile accident,
could have any other influence than to cement more closely the family
unity.
I was even so guileless as to suspect nothing, when, in the middle
of April, I received a letter from Cornelia, saying that Oliver had
gone to Paris for some months to get material for his war book,
_Lying Abroad for One’s Country_; that she was taking the children
to southern California for an indefinite sojourn; and that she hoped
I might visit them when my college work was over—there was something
which she wished very much to talk about. I searched through
the letter to see if I could discover what it was. To my obtuse
perceptions, the point of interest appeared not to be in the main
news but in the incidental reference to Cornelia’s religious bias,
contained in the following paragraph:—
“Don’t be afraid,” she wrote, “of going to southern California in
July. The climate is delightfully right, if only one stays near
enough to the coast. I have been hoping for years to spend a summer
there, but have always had to give it up because my cousin Ethelwyn
lives there! Such a pity: she has a charming Spanish house—Spanish
with American improvements—in a walnut grove, with a ‘kitchen garden’
of orange and fig trees, near a little village ten or fifteen miles
north of San Diego. But she—I have told you something about her,
haven’t I?—she is a Theosophist or a Bahaist or one of those dreadful
things that Boston Unitarians become infected with when they live
long in California. And the people she has around her—well, fond as I
am of her, I myself find them impossible; and Oliver always used to
say that he would ‘rather be d——d to all eternity with Voltaire than
spend ten minutes in Heaven with Ethelwyn.’ Well, poor dear Ethelwyn
has just had a chance to join a pilgrim ship, which is going by way
of China and India to visit some ‘saint’ in—I think—Arabia; and she
has offered me the place, together with all the servants, for a
year. My sister Alice will go with me for company. We shall fumigate
and air the place thoroughly! I have engaged an excellent tutor for
the children—a young man from St. Luke’s School; and we shall see
what can be done to get them back again to their right minds before
they go to college in the fall. So do come and help us!”
To anyone acquainted with either Cornelia or California, it should be
needless to say that I went. How I went, may interest the curious.
Members of the poor-professor class have, as they have frequently
explained to the public, many tastes in common with respectable
well-to-do-people—tastes which of course they are unable to gratify.
But they have one expensive taste, which, with a little craft, they
can indulge almost as fully as people with something to live on. I
refer to their inclination for running about the country. I shall
always remain in the teaching profession because, no matter whither a
poor professor wishes to travel, there is always some group of kindly
Americans ready to pay his expenses to and from his base, provided he
will speak to them on any side of any subject he pleases—loudly and
for not more than fifty minutes. There was, in July, a pretty warm
educational convention in Los Angeles, designed to keep the State
of California educationally well in the lead of Massachusetts. I
spoke on three successive mornings, expanding an ancient club-paper
into a three-day serial by presenting its platitudes more slowly
and impressively than club custom permits. However, we are not now
concerned with that.
As I left the auditorium platform on the third morning, and, in the
anteroom, was receiving my fee, Dorothy and Oliver Junior, bareheaded
and browned by southern sunshine, burst in. “Hello!” cried Oliver,
“car’s outside. This your dunnage?” Dorothy, on the impulse of the
moment, kissed me, which made me think well of myself, and even
better of her than ever, for twenty-four hours afterwards. I was
wondering how Oliver felt about driving, when Dorothy jumped in and,
taking the wheel, sent me to the rear seat with her brother.
We worked our way cautiously out of the congested somnolent city,
which expands its amorphous immensity while it sleeps. Then the
efficient young pilot whirled us along at high speed over the four-
or five-hour trip, through orange groves and highways lined with
palms, by sea and sandy waste, through pines and pale-gold grass,
past San Juan Capistrano, gorgeous with flowers, across the mesa
by the old Mission road, to the outskirts of La Jolla, then, with a
sharp turn up a little valley, into a cool sea-freshened wilderness
of green walnut trees among which, cream-yellow, flat-roofed, Santo
Espiritu emerges, couched against the foothills of Mount Soledad.
II
OLIVER JUNIOR DISCUSSES HIS PARENTS, THEIR RELIGION, AND HIS OWN
I did not see these things which I have just mentioned; I only
remembered them vaguely afterward. Almost as soon as we had seated
ourselves in the car, we began to talk about a subject which put
landscape quite out of my head. Young Oliver, I might say in passing,
is a ready talker with something of the startling candor of his
father. I should perhaps add that his preparation for college along
with his sister, who is two years younger, is due to the irregularity
of his preparatory-school work—interrupted by a period of nearly two
years’ service as His Excellency’s private secretary in Europe.
Ruminating on the possible length of my visit at Santo Espiritu, I
had remarked, “I suppose your father will come out later in the year.”
“I suppose he won’t,” said Oliver. “I suspect he intends to live in
Paris.”
“Intends to do what?” I exclaimed.
“To live abroad somewhere. I suppose you know that my father and
mother have separated.”
“Nonsense, Ollie,” Dorothy shouted back over her shoulder. “You know
you don’t believe that! They always separate in the summer.”
“That’s true,” said her brother. “Dad always had to have a vacation
from the family. He always took one whenever, as he used to say to
us, ‘Your mother is growing too good to be true. I’ve got to have a
rest.’ But other summers they have agreed to separate—peaceably—by
collusion. This time father went off in a flaming huff. And I don’t
think my mother is in a mood to ask him back again. Their relations
have been severely strained.”
“Oliver,” I said, “you are your father over again for diabolical
badinage. Cut it out, please. Tell me seriously what you are talking
about.”
“I’m as serious,” he replied, “as a great horned owl. Dolly and I
have reasoned earnestly with them both. But our parents are hard
people to deal with on a rational basis. My mother has principles,
you know; and it’s no use talking to people with principles. And my
father, when he gets in a huff, is as obstinate as a mule.”
“Come now,” I urged with a little irritation, “is there anything in
this, at all? What was the huff about?”
“Well—a huff, you know,” instructed the wise youth, “is just the
kettle boiling over, after it has been heated a long time. I’m afraid
it all goes back to my New Year’s scrape; but it goes back of that
to other sins of mine—and maybe Dorothy’s—that father knew about and
she didn’t; and it goes back of that to the big quarrel between the
ancients and the moderns. Father is on the modern side—at least he
wants to be. My mother is all for the good old ways. So, you see,
there’s a fundamental incompatibility.”
“Yes,” I said, “I understand all that; but tell me about the huff.”
Oliver leaned forward and spoke in his sister’s ear. She nodded. Then
he said:—
“Well, the fact is that he and mother hadn’t been hitting it off
at all this spring. Dolly and I both noticed it months ago. We
were all more or less strung up; and they got on each other’s
nerves—noticeably. My mother is—well you know how my mother is,
ordinarily.”
“Yes, I do,” I said; “your mother has the most perfect temper in the
world. Go on.”
“Ordinarily, yes,” testified her son; “but when she gets a thing on
her mind, or her conscience, or wherever it is, she never lets it
rest. She is that way. She gets sort of keyed up or wound up or
whatever it is, and then she goes off like an alarm clock. When she
gets excited, father begins to jest, and he keeps his head for a
while. But she sticks at him till he stops jesting; and then he gets
more excited than she is; and then—it’s all up.”
“Well?”
“Well, all spring mother had been dinning at him—”
“Oh, get out!” I exclaimed, “Your mother doesn’t ‘din.’”
“Oh, doesn’t she! Doesn’t she! Very well. All spring, mother had been
gently speaking to dad at rather frequent intervals about his not
backing her up in her ideas for Dolly’s and my salvation. Of course
you understand that young people of our age are always in danger of
heading for the City of Destruction.”
“Yes, that’s obvious enough,” I said.
“Well, one day I overheard them at it—overheard my mother gently
reminding my father about me. She said to him: ‘I warned you and
warned you and warned you, that if you didn’t take a father’s part
and back me up, Oliver would get into trouble; but you just laughed
and encouraged him. Now see what you have brought on us.’ That
subject wasn’t very pleasant to any of us in the first place; and my
father had got sick of it in the form of cold hash. Dad said: ‘Here
beginneth the ninety-ninth lesson!’ Mother said: ‘But you have got
to take a father’s part.’ Dad said: ‘As it was in the beginning: I
don’t want to hear any more about that.’ Mother repeated precisely
the same thing in different words. He said: ‘Look here! I thought we
had agreed to let that subject rest.’ Mother varied the phrase and
presented her thought again. Father exclaimed: ‘Don’t repeat that!
Are you crazy?’ Mother instantly replied: ‘You never, never, back me
up. You never do a father’s part. And now see this horrible, horrible
thing you have got us into!’ Father began to lose his temper; and as
soon as he does that, she seems possessed with a desire to see how
far she can make him go.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“All right, you needn’t. But you wouldn’t forget if you had ever
heard it. Mother said it again—the same thing identically, only with
a little more sting in it. Then dad began to swear; but he always
hates himself for a week afterward when he does, so he pulled himself
up, and told her to stop or he didn’t know what he’d do. Well, I sat
still and counted, and my mother jabbed him in the wound nine times
in all by actual count with that identical taunt. Then poor old dad,
who had been stalking back and forth like the tiger over in Balboa
Park, bolted without a word. He went down to Washington for a couple
of days. When he came back, he just quietly announced that he was
going to Paris. ‘You may say, to work on my book—for an indefinite
period.’ Mother said in her most impervious manner: ‘Very well, then:
go.’ Father replied,—as frosty as a wedding cake,—‘Thank you, I
will.’ Then they both bowed. It was like a play. Dorothy and I came
in from the wings and offered friendly mediation; in vain. Father
packed up and went. Dolly and I don’t think either of them is quite
sensible.”
“H-m,” I said reflectively, “h-m-m—What is your mother doing now?”
“Why she’s done—we’ve all done—California from Mount Shasta to Tia
Juana, specializing on the Missions and the juniper trees from
Palestine that the padres planted. But now we’re doing religion.
We’ve settled down in Santo Espiritu with Aunt Alice and our
tutor,—Dolly and I call him Father Blakewell to his face and the
Holy Father behind his back; he’s going to be an Anglican monk,
you know,—we’ve settled down to do religion, mainly, and get ready
for college, incidentally. Mother is really ‘doing’ it; Dolly and
I—well, we ‘assist,’ in the French sense. We study a little, and go
to church a lot, and swim in the afternoon, and play mah jongg after
dinner; and the Holy Father reads prayers in the morning on week
days and twice on Sundays; and Mother is reading Newman’s _Idea of
a University_ aloud, and she goes to early communion, and fasts on
saints’ days, and is a member of the altar guild—and she is taking in
laundry.”
“Taking in what?” I ejaculated.
“Taking in laundry. She has consecrated her hands to the Church. She
washes the rector’s vestments and things. You know she always had
a kind of passion for keeping things clean—souls and bodies and so
on. So this job just hits her fancy now, and ‘fills her life,’ you
know. When we started for Los Angeles this morning, she was ironing
the vestments, and, believe me, when I saw her bending over the
ironing-board, she looked so perfectly blissful that I—I pitied her.
It seems kind of daffy to me.”
Though the painter was satirical, the picture, to my fond
imagination, was delightful. I saw her—herself all in white—bending
her golden head over the snowy linen, her hands moving smoothly;
it would be a very special iron, silver perhaps. She would do it
beautifully, adorably. I should be reminded of some early Italian
saint; and all the æsthetic Christianity in me would enjoy a kind of
Pre-Raphaelite resurrection.
“H-m,” I repeated helplessly. I hadn’t the faintest notion how to
treat the idea with any profit to a young fellow of Oliver’s age
and point of view. It simply wasn’t in his experience, and I didn’t
see how to put it there. His fondness for his mother, his complete
detachment from her religious interests, his absolute incomprehension
of her position appalled me. One can reason with an earnest young
intellectual rebel, occasionally to some effect. But an amused young
seraph in Oliver’s state, contemplating his mother with kindly
compassion from his pinnacle of intellectual certitude and religious
inexperience—one can’t even draw such a person to the portals of
argument.
“I hope,” I said, “you and Dorothy are behaving yourselves at home,
as well as you know how.”
“Oh yes,” he replied, “we are being good, aren’t we, Dolly? Wait
till you hear us after dinner discussing with the Holy Father
about the existence of angels, and the Apostolic Succession, and
the priority of Persons in the Blessed Trinity. Dorothy and I got
together and decided it was up to us to mortify our sinful flesh by
holding our tongues this summer. Even father used to do that, most of
the time, so far as religion is concerned; and it was harder for him
than it is for us.”
“How was that?”
“Oh, father, you know, doesn’t believe in anything. He calls himself
an ‘old Voltairean,’ and he reads Herbert Spencer and Nietzsche and
Henry Adams. But he really doesn’t believe in anything but chaos
and the ‘struggle for survival’ and the ‘degradation of energy.’ We
believe in plenty of things.”
“Do you really!” I exclaimed, genuinely delighted. “That’s good. Tell
me what they are.”
“Well, in religious matters we agree with father as little as with
mother. He is always talking about ‘jungle ethics’ and ‘the law of
survival.’ He thinks he is the only realist. But that is old stuff,
and it doesn’t sound good to us. We don’t fall for the cave-man line
of aristocracy that Dreiser and Mencken and Lawrence and those
fellows are trying to bring in.”
“Where do you get your line?”
“Oh, out of books and talk and out of the air; some of it we think
out ourselves, and a little of it we get from Hoover and Lane and
what father calls the ‘Western roughneck crowd.’ Since January, we’re
teetotalers; and father, of course, is only a prohibitionist. Then
we’re sick of war—we don’t think it’s sensible; and we’re sick of
supermen; and we’re sick of belonging to the ‘privileged class.’ We
believe in the real square deal and good sportsmanship and common
sense and common decency and health and hygiene and science and
beauty—and a lot of things like that. Of course, father and mother
pretend that they do, too—in a way. But we are radical democrats, I
guess; and father and mother are both snobs.”
Dorothy, listening to as much as she could catch from the steering
wheel, called back:—
“Father isn’t a snob—mother is.”
“You are wrong, Dolly,” said her brother; “they are both snobs. We
are really interested in the People. Neither of them cares two straws
for anyone outside their own class—except, of course, that father
has a personal friend here and there among the cab-drivers and the
police. He thinks that he is being like Roosevelt. And that he’s like
Roosevelt when he goes around among the ‘peasantry,’ as he calls
them, whooping it up for big families, and patting them on the back
for having eighteen little morons, and making it a crime to tell them
how to get a chance to live like civilized beings.”
“I’ve heard your father say very sensible things about that. You do
him an injustice.”
“No, I don’t. We believe in telling people the truth; and in
finding out first what it is. Father believes in making a Federal
statute first, to keep the peasantry peasants, and busy propagating
mill-hands and soldiers; and then in violating it himself as he sees
fit. Father is personally interested in the truth, and he really
knows a lot about it; but he wouldn’t dream of telling it to anyone
but an intimate friend—he doesn’t think it’s safe. And mother doesn’t
think it’s decent. Besides, she hates like sin to admit even to
herself the existence of any fact that doesn’t fit into her vision of
a ‘nice’ world. She likes to sit on the shore and order the sea back.
She really enjoys deceiving herself, and is pretty good at it. Father
isn’t like that.”
“So you side with him there?”
“Yes, except that father is a sort of double personality. Privately,
you know, dad is a cynical cosmopolitan, and he thinks America is
a hick joint except for half a dozen of his own cronies. But you
know how he stands in public, wrapping the flag around him, and
doing the big bowwow at Japan and Mexico, and standing pat with the
pattest element of the Grand Old Party’s patriots. Dad knows who
cuts the melons. Dolly and I are sick of that. We want to come in
on the ground floor and on the square. We want to have careers that
we have made for ourselves, and not be handed something on a silver
plate by one of father’s friends. Then we are sort of sick of this
‘cosmopolitan’ stuff—which means only that you hate your own things
and can’t even smoke American tobacco unless it’s been imported from
England. We’ve got so tired of it that we are going to organize a new
party with Flapjacks and Ham and Eggs for our slogan. The fact is,
we get a sort of kick out of our feeling for the country—as our own,
you know, a poor thing but our own; and we want to try and see if we
can’t be honest-to-goodness Americans before we die—if you understand
what I mean.”
“Bully for you!” I cried, in spite of my neutral intentions.
“But mother,” he continued, “has been reading the Barsetshire novels
all summer, and Trollope always makes her homesick for the ‘old
home.’ She is crazy anyway over the English cathedral towns, and
hopes to be buried in one when she dies. And just now she’s got a
kind of Golden-Age complex. She hopes to save me from the democracy
by sending me to one of the old Eastern colleges, where I shall
associate with ‘young gentlemen’ from Anglicized prep schools, and
live in a Gothic dormitory, and be tutored by Rhodes scholars, who
are mostly nuts. Dorothy and I have decided that we want to go to a
State University and get acquainted with the Plain People. And so
mother carries us off to Santo Espiritu and segregates us with the
Holy Father, in the hope that the seeds of grace and exclusiveness
will take root in our unsanctified hearts.”
“She is ‘getting results’!” I said to myself; and then aloud: “But
don’t you like California?”
“Sure!” he said, with his father’s flickering smile. “Who wouldn’t?
It’s just the place to go to Heaven in. But it doesn’t seem like our
own old Yankee Land out here. No one hurries. No one but the Japanese
farmer does a lick of work—that’s why they hate him so. The white
people just sit around and wait for the Mid-Westerners to bring them
their savings. Unless you are descended from a Forty-niner, no one
cares who your grandfather was, or whether you are a Mormon or a
Christian Scientist or a Presbyterian or a Seventh Day Adventist. All
the best things in the State are public property and are out of doors
where everyone can get at them. There isn’t any ‘Main Street.’ A few
of them keep office hours, but they picnic going to and fro; and up
in San Francisco the business men take a sea trip every morning and
evening. It all feels like a late afternoon in Arcadia.”
I glanced at my watch and remarked that we must be near Santo
Espiritu.
“Yes,” said Oliver; “but let me tell you a little more about the
Native Sons. They are having an influence on Dolly’s and my religious
beliefs. They get so much harmless pleasure out of the world. They
sit around eating apricots and looking at the poppy fields most of
the time. When they are very energetic, they get up and recite their
own verses, or they go into the redwoods and stage a forest play, or,
maybe, do some Greek dances in the almost-altogether, interpreting
the Song of Solomon or the Eden story. When they weary of improving
their minds with art and song, the whole white population goes
camping up around Tahoe or hiking in the high Sierras or motoring
down to Coronado or sword-fishing over at Catalina. Easterners and
Midlanders who come here late in life easily get mixed up, they
tell me, in these new religions, the way Cousin Ethelwyn did; but
the real Californian doesn’t take interest in the future life. The
present is good enough for him. ‘Wasn’t it too bad,’ I heard one
of them say, ‘that Saint John didn’t see Santa Barbara before he
wrote _Revelation_’! And Dorothy and I have sort of reasoned it out
that the so-called decay of religion in our generation is rather
complimentary to Providence, indicating that we haven’t got such a
grouch as some of those old boys had against the land that the Lord
gave to our fathers.”
“That is a discussible point of view,” I admitted.
“But here,” he said, “is where we turn off from the main road. It’s
only a little way now. You’ll see, before you’ve been five minutes
in Santo Espiritu, what a colony of aliens we are, practising our
austerities in our august retreat on the outskirts of these careless
worldlings.”
III
TABLE TALK AT SANTO ESPIRITU
I had been having a curiously disquieting premonition—primarily
the result of Oliver’s indiscreet betrayal of intimate family
matters—that Cornelia must have been gravely altered by the shocks
and strains of the preceding seven months. She might seem almost a
stranger, I thought; and as we plunged into the walnut grove and I
caught a glimpse in the distance of the broad yellowish-white front
of the villa, and knew that in a few seconds I should see her, I
was conscious of a caved-in feeling, together with a tension of the
nerves, such as Enoch Arden experienced on turning into his garden
walk after a protracted absence. But so far as the eye could see,
there was absolutely nothing in my premonition.
As we drew up before the door of Santo Espiritu, she waved to us
from an open window and flew out to meet us, with her incredible,
indescribable air of a young girl, and in a certain very simple blue
gown, or the replica of a blue gown in which I had remarked last
summer that she looked like a bluebird. Cornelia, as I had known
her, had at least three principal moods: her winter mood, in which
she was His Excellency’s hostess, and the note was a quite mature
graciousness; her summer mood, in which she was the children’s
mother, and the note was high ethical solicitude; and her country
walking mood, in which she reverted to the appearance of seventeen,
and the note approached caprice. When I saw the blue gown,—maybe it
was a ‘frock,’—I said to myself, “She is in her country walking-mood!”
She greeted me with bright gayety, untinged, so far as I could
perceive, by suppressed feeling. Then she led me through a spacious
hall and across a magnificent area of Navajo rugs into a pleasant
dusky living-room, where I made the acquaintance of her sister Alice,
an agreeably quiet woman with peaceful eyes, and the children’s
tutor, Mr. Blakewell, a young fellow with extraordinarily courteous
manner and easy conversation, but with the ascetic pallor and the
faded iris which one associates with “spirituality.”
I shall not dwell on these minor figures in the scene. They
interested me only as notes of the background in which Cornelia had
developed a fourth mood, which was new to me.
As soon as the travelers had removed their dust, we all met for an
early dinner. This was served in the suave air under the sky canopy
of the patio or inner court—a delightful place, equipped with a
fireplace against chilly evenings, and partly tiled and spread with
Indian rugs; on three sides there was a narrow strip of lawn fringed
with roses and sweet-smelling shrubs; wistaria and myrtle and some
flaming-blossomed vine tapestried the walls and rambled over the
roof and festooned the wide archway on the west, which opened into
a walled garden, green beneath a spraying fountain—the removal of
the fountain from the patio to the garden being one of the “American
improvements.”
“Father” Blakewell murmured a Latin grace upon the repast and, in
the course of the meal, quoted us some of the rules of an English
Benedictine monastery in which he had sojourned. This, I assume, was
less to asperse us with the odor of sanctity than with the elements
of Latin, which the young people maintained was an unnecessary
burden. “Every man,” said Oliver, “should know American; then, if he
feels the need of a ‘second language,’ let him study English.” But
the children rather took the lead in the conversation announcing
that, in honor of Saint Mary of the Sea, the family had adopted a
fish diet, and that they had made a penitential hymn, which they at
once proceeded to chant. It ran something like this:—
To-day’s Monday,
To-day’s Monday,
Monday, barracuda,
Tuesday, mackerel,
Wednesday, flounder—
and so forth. The only other scraps of the table talk which I retain
are connected with Cornelia’s amused and amusing summary of a letter
from Ethelwyn, who had visited her “Arabian saint” and reported that
the leader of her party, an ex-Evangelical clergyman from Nebraska,
who spoke only English and had never before been outside the United
States, had, on being addressed by the saint in Arabic, understood
perfectly everything that was said to him.
“My Lord!” Oliver exclaimed,—“I beg your pardon,—By Pollux! I wish
I could get up my Vergil that way!” Dorothy said that she didn’t
understand why her mother and the rest of them made so much fun of
Cousin Ethelwyn: it seemed to her, she said demurely, “very much like
Pentecost.” Father Blakewell explained the distinction, but I have
forgotten just what it was. I infer that the children were cutting
up a little on my account; for Oliver followed his sister with a
grave-faced remonstrance against their “bigotry” toward the new
mystical Oriental cults: they had something, he said, which people
seemed to want; and, for his part, though he didn’t care for the
style of their prophets, he thought there was a lot of common-sense
in some of the Bahaist notions about world peace and about bringing
forward the common ethical basis of all the great first-class
religions.
“But Oliver dear,” said Cornelia, “you really wouldn’t care for these
Orientals, if you had to associate with them. They are so—well,
I suppose some of them may be clean. But for a really well-bred,
intelligent woman, like Ethelwyn, to go trailing around the world
after an ignorant barefooted Arabian peasant seems to me to be almost
disgusting—it’s so—so eccentric.”
“I suppose,” replied her son, “that well-bred Romans of the first
century felt very much as you do when Saint Paul, the humpbacked
tailor of Tarsus, tried to introduce his Levantine fanaticisms into
the Forum.”
“Oliver! That, you know, was very different,” said Cornelia. “Saint
Paul was in the central religious tradition of the world: what Newman
calls the ‘classical’ religion, the formative power in what he calls
our ‘classical’ Western civilization. It means so much to be central
and not eccentric.”
“Was Saint Paul ‘central’ when he appeared in Rome?” asked the
incorrigible youth.
“You answer him, Mr. Blakewell,” said Cornelia.
“I think,” said the young man quietly and seriously, “that Saint Paul
was central wherever he appeared.”
“I see,” said Oliver.
At the same instant he and Dorothy exchanged winks; and all this
arguing abruptly ceased. Then we strolled into the garden, where I
was urged to light my cigar. We examined the water lilies under the
fountain, and the various exotic plants which Ethelwyn’s gardeners
had persuaded to perfume the air. Cornelia put a sprig of heliotrope
in my buttonhole, smilingly quoting a line of _The Winter’s Tale_
about flowers for my “time of day.” Presently the children, with
Father Blakewell and their Aunt Alice, returned to the court, where
the mah jongg outfit had been set out in place of the dinner-table
and a little fire of cedar wood had been lighted, more for its
social fragrance than from any need of it. Soon we heard a pleasant
chatter of “seasons” and “green dragons” and “characters.”
It was a pleasant picture, as we looked in on it through the archway.
We stood there together for a moment, her shoulder just brushing
my sleeve, and we seemed both to be studying the scene, like—I
sentimentalized it long afterward—like a pair of happy parents fondly
watching their children at play. We seemed both to be thinking
of the same thing; but I know that we were not; for I myself was
thinking what a wonderful chatelaine Cornelia was, and what elaborate
properties she really required for the adequate staging of her part
in life, and what an unutterable fool any poor professor would be
who should think that, if he picked up that little exquisite body
by my side, he could carry off Cornelia, and make her his own.
What I loved in her, I said to myself in a kind of bittersweet
paroxysm of realization, was paradoxically _not in her_; it was the
charming world which she had the gift of creating around her; and it
would require a caravan of elephants to provide her with suitable
accessories for the lodging of a single night.
“And now,” said Cornelia, recalling me from my swift revery, “if you
don’t mind walking so soon after dinner, I’m going to take you down
to the sea—for the sunset.” She glanced at me sidewise and upward
from gray eyes which deliciously feigned serious question about the
words which her lips were framing: “Do you mind?”
IV
A SILENCE BY THE SEA
It is a half hour’s walk from Santo Espiritu to the sea.
As we went through the gate of the walled garden into the walnut
grove, Cornelia patted my arm lightly, like a shy, affectionate,
approving child, and said softly: “I’m so glad you came.”
“And I.”
“But let’s not talk about that yet. Let’s walk first. I do hope there
will be a fine sunset. We have them here so seldom. This evening it
looks right.”
We walked on swiftly, chatting of nothings; through the trees; a
short distance along the Santo Espiritu valley road; then up a
steepish path to the tufted gopher-burrowed mesa; and across it and
down it through zigzags among the sagebrush and thorny gray shrubs
toward the ocean, over which hung a dull gray curtain of cloud. There
was nothing bright in the scene but the “bluebird gown” of Cornelia,
flitting down the gray-lichened slope ahead of me. But the dull blue
expanse of the sea brightened a little as we crossed a strip of
level ground at the foot of the mesa and came to a stand on the edge
of a long crescent-shaped bluff. I looked out at the fishing boats
anchored a quarter of a mile from shore.
“Look down!” said Cornelia. “This is one of our show places. And
you’d better sit down, if you are dizzy at all.”
We both sat and peered over the undercut rim of the bluff. Fifty feet
below us was the sea, deep, still, emerald green, transparent and
quivering with waves of pale green light, down into misty recesses
where its depth rendered it opaque. Up through the floating foliage
of the seaweed, goldfish were swimming idly, big ones in the grand
style, tremendously decorative, and thoroughly conscious, I thought,
of the stunning effect of their gold in the green water. I was
fascinated by them. I stretched myself flat, face downward, and
pulled myself to the rim and studied them. A damnable thought was
swimming up to me out of submarine caverns of “the unplumbed salt
estranging sea.”
At first my thought had no shape. It merely stirred in dark
obscurity, like an irritated squid or devilfish. Then it emerged—with
a golden head, like a mermaid’s. I am not ordinarily fanciful or
figurative. I dislike fanciful people. But I have somehow got to
convey the idea that, as I watched those goldfish, the wires in my
mind became crossed and tangled and, for a moment, made some sort
of horrid imaginative connection between goldfish and mermaids
and the enchantingly girlish figure and golden head of the woman
whose gray eyes I felt but could not see, playing over my prostrate
body and working some charm at the back of my neck. Cornelia had
everything—yes, everything: the virtues and the graces, and a beauty
and blitheness which often seemed enough in themselves, they made one
so immediately, unmistakably glad to be alive within their radius.
But wouldn’t she have profited—as Arnold once remarked of the ladies
of the English aristocracy, whom Cornelia admires so much—wouldn’t
she have profited by “a shade more of soul”? Was there much—inside,
under those golden scales? Wasn’t she pretty near the surface? And
was that her fault or her misadventure?
“Do you find them interesting?” asked Cornelia.
“Yes,” I replied, continuing my study.
In spite of her nearly grown children, there was something virginal
in Cornelia. Something curiously undeveloped; was it, perhaps, her
heart? That would be like a mermaiden. She was no Circe, I mused,
guilefully weaving subtle spells. She was an otherwise mature woman
who had somehow remained essentially innocent and child-hearted,
singing still to herself, in her “secret garden,” the songs of
seventeen. She herself did not know, she could not know, what strains
of richer harmony had been lost to her ears—and to mine, because we
had never emerged from the walled garden, had not dared to venture
together into the “dark forest” of experience. She herself was an
undeveloped theme, a divine fragment of melody, which the winds
hummed and the sea sang, and which hovered all days and all nights in
the tenebrous deeps of my enchanted heart.
“Look up now,” said Cornelia softly.
I wriggled back from the verge of the bluff, and sat up, and looked
up.
While I had been lying there in prone contemplation of the goldfish,
the awaited sunset had arrived, and with a magnificence of splendor
unparalleled in my memory. The sun itself was not visible. But the
dull gray curtain, which, as we were descending the mesa, hung from
the zenith to the sea, had vanished before the passionate resurgency
of light. Overhead, extending from north to south, stretched a vast
skyland of royal purple, its lower edge, or shore, tinged with deep
rose color, where the waves of light beat against it. Near the
“shore” was a bright clear crystalline tract, without any cloud; but
elsewhere, farther out in that celestial sea, gleamed, glowed, burned
an immense archipelago of golden islands. It looked like Polynesia
transfigured with fire and praising God on the Day of Judgment.
It took my breath away. I gazed spellbound, like the spellbound
color in the sky, to which Cornelia had called my attention just
as it reached its brief period of seeming fixed and changeless and
eternal. I turned to her. She was quietly watching my response to her
sunset. Our eyes met; and for an instant they clinched. Then her lids
drooped, and she said:—
“You were so good to come!”
“So good? So good?” I repeated gropingly. “I don’t know whether I
am good or not. I am happy that I came. I only know that I am very
happy. Is that a sign of goodness, Cornelia?”
“Yes,” she said, and her eyes met mine again and held them prisoners,
while she went past them looking for something behind them, and I
went past her eyes, also in search. We said nothing. The sea was
still. There was not a sound from the bare brown land between us and
the mesa.
Suddenly, out on the bare brown land, a meadowlark sent up her little
bubbling fountain of song—once, twice. Then she was still. We smiled
at each other as the echoes of the bird’s good-night reverberated
through our nerves and died away. Then the silence fell, deeper
than before. It was delightful at first. Then it became oppressive,
exciting. It clutched at one’s heart and made it thud. Or was it
something else—something that had stolen up, in the silence, between
us?
Cornelia broke the spell. “Did you hear it?” she asked.
“The meadowlark, do you mean?”
“No. Of course you heard that!”
“What else—should I have heard?”
“Well, never mind that just now. I want you to tell me something
else. How much—how much did the children tell you?”
“Everything.”
“I hoped they would; I hoped they would.”
“Then it’s true, Cornelia?”
“What is true?”
“That you and Oliver have separated.”
“Oh—that? That is a minor matter.”
“Minor? How minor?” I exclaimed in some bewilderment.
“Why, compared with other experiences. I wasn’t thinking about Oliver
just now. It’s a horrid thing to say; but I’m not interested in
Oliver just now. We’ve always been separated—in a sense. And just
now, I feel as if he didn’t belong to me, nor I to him; as if he were
someone that I had known once, and didn’t know any more.”
“How did it happen, Cornelia?—I don’t mean what the children told me.
But the rest of it—if you—if you want me to know.”
“Yes,” she said, “I do want you to know, because—well, I want you
to understand. You know that I was not in love with Oliver when I
married him. I liked him very much. I do now, in a way. But I married
him because he offered me the life that I wanted, then, and that my
father and mother thought suitable. And I gave him, at least for
a long time, what he wanted—mainly—of a wife: a woman who would
look well in public with him, and entertain his friends, and be the
mother of his children. When the children were little, we were closer
together, for a few years, than we have ever been since. Still, as
time went on, of course we accumulated ‘things in common’—actual
things and experiences and acquaintances; and as many of them—nearly
all of them—were nice things and pleasant acquaintances and agreeable
experiences, I was not dissatisfied; and I began to believe
there wasn’t much more to be had from life than just the kind of
satisfaction I had found. I believed, or pretended to believe, what
you were saying last summer: that the ‘inner life’ is of small
consequence, and that everything that is precious can be—what did
you call it?—‘externalized,’ ‘objectified.’ Do you really believe it
yourself?”
“I try to keep in mind,” I explained, “all that can be said for that
theory. It is a kind of compromise, a second-best sort of theory,
which many of us have to accept, when we are starving, or when a
death takes place in the inner chamber of our lives. That’s what our
wits are for, isn’t it—to help us put up gracefully with what we have
to put up with—grace or no grace?”
“But the theory is worthless,” cried Cornelia; “it’s absolutely
worthless, when one is in trouble, in serious trouble! I suppose
I have had less of it than anyone I know. As I look over my life
before this year, it seems like a dream, it has been so easy and
so fortunate. But when trouble does come,—illness, death, and that
sort of thing,—one has to have inner resources. Oliver has no inner
resources. Oliver hates trouble, and illness, and pain; and, whenever
he can, he runs away from them. When he is sick himself, he acts like
an untrained child. He is terrified and certain that he is going to
die; he is really dreadfully afraid of death—his own death, or the
death of anyone he is fond of.”
“That is interesting,” I said. “I didn’t suppose that at bottom
Oliver took anything seriously.”
“He doesn’t,” said Cornelia, “except _that_—trouble to himself, I
mean, and to a few others whom he regards as part of himself. As for
anyone else, he is always saying, ‘It is easy to bear the misfortunes
of others.’ Generally speaking, he isn’t serious about anything.
When he isn’t in a fit of being pessimistic and panic-stricken about
himself, he is just cynical and flippant. He doesn’t believe that
goodness is worth trying for. He laughs at all the principles which
I was taught to regard as elementary. He calls them ‘virtues of the
bourgeoisie’ and ‘old maids’ morality.’ When I protest, Oliver says
my humor is ‘thin.’ Sometimes he says I am ‘devoid’ of humor. I am
not! _Am_ I devoid of humor?”
“No, Cornelia,” I said. “But humor isn’t your strong point. In your
lighter vein, you incline rather toward a gleeful gayety. Humor, in
Oliver, results from a skepticism regarding first principles; and you
are not skeptical about first principles.”
“I am not, thank goodness. I do like to see people gay and
light-hearted and happy, and I like to be that way myself. But I
am light-hearted and gay only because I am clear about what you
call ‘first principles.’ Life hasn’t any dignity, any decorum, or
justification, even, if one is constantly questioning or mocking
at everything there is in it that is axiomatic. Oliver has no
axioms except derisive ones that he makes for himself. To me, it
isn’t endurable to be with people who refuse to take serious things
seriously. When one jests at serious things, one not merely destroys
their seriousness, but one takes all the joy out of the joyous and
light-hearted things—all the bloom from life.”
“I suspect,” I said, “there is a good deal of truth in that.”
“And so,” she continued, “when this dreadful accident happened on
New Year’s Eve, I didn’t expect _much_ of Oliver; but I hoped, hoped,
hoped it might make him a little bit serious about the children. It
did nothing for him, nothing. All he wanted was to put it out of his
mind as quickly as possible. Whenever I tried to talk with him about
anything serious—or anything sacred to me—he simply wasn’t there.”
“Many men,” I said, “are shy about those things, and feel more deeply
than they can bear to confess. Perhaps you don’t quite understand
Oliver.” I put in this plea, partly because I thought it was true,
and partly because I was curious to know the depth of Cornelia’s
disillusionment and estrangement.
“Often and often I remembered, this spring,” she replied evasively,
“how my sweet old grandmother used to talk to me, when I was a girl.
‘Marry a man, my dear,’ she would say, ‘who will help you not to be
afraid of death or anything that can happen to you in this world.’
And then again she would say, ‘Marry a man, my dear, who has a sacred
place in his own heart; and then everything that is precious to you
will be safe; and you will not be alone in the great joys and the
great sorrows that life has in store for us all.’ And I would ask,
‘Was grandfather like that?’ And the dear old soul would draw in her
breath and say: ‘Oh, _he_ was high! He was _high_!’ with an accent
of adoration which made one feel that he must have been a beautiful
spirit. ‘I would have gone anywhere with him,’ she always concluded
when we talked about him, ‘and I would have suffered anything with
him gladly, because we were together in a place where nothing in this
world could really touch our companionship.’”
“That is very lovely,” I murmured. “That was such a union as one
reads about in old romances, and dreams about, when one is young.”
“And so,” she continued, “when I was first married, I hoped that it
might be like that with us. Oliver seemed to me then so strong and
self-sufficient, and his personality seemed so various and flexible
and so full of color and high spirits and charm. I thought that, when
I knew him better, and had been taken into the innermost intimacy, I
should find there a still serene place, such as my grandmother had
described, with a kind of mysterious joy and rapture at the heart of
it, because we should be united in loving together everything that
had been almost too lovely and too sacred to speak of to anyone else.
That is what I thought marriage was, the inner meaning of it—and
not a barren desolate place, full of darkness and cynicism and the
terror of death. Do you understand, a little, why I felt so alone,
so helplessly alone early in the year? and why I wanted to talk with
you this summer, and why I have just _had_ to tell you these things
to-night?”
She put out her hand toward mine; mine closed over it.
“Cornelia,” I said, “I loved you twenty years ago, and—in some ways I
haven’t changed much since. Have you?”
“Please—please don’t!” she said, gently withdrawing her hand.
“And when the silence fell around us here, a little while ago,” I
continued, “and the meadowlark sang in it, and then it was still
again, didn’t you feel, didn’t you know—Cornelia, tell me what the
silence said to you, when it grew too intense, and you broke it.”
She lifted her head and seemed for a moment to be following the
flight of a sea gull winging into the darkening West. Then she turned
her cool gray eyes upon mine, steadily, steadily, till their flame
burnt under my ribs and close about my heart.
“The silence said to me,” she replied, “that I had been a very
foolish woman—Isn’t it strange how suddenly the color is leaving the
sky! You can almost see it fade while you watch it—like the glow in
an electric toaster, when you turn it off.” She rose, as if talk were
over, and we were going home. I followed, bent on a continuation.
“Yes,” I said, “I suppose the sun over there behind the cloud bank
has just sunk under the sea. You would think someone had pressed a
button. It reminds me of the _Ancient Mariner_—‘At one stride, came
the dark.’ But how have you been a ‘foolish’ woman?”
“Perhaps,” said Cornelia, “we had better return the long way, by the
road. The dusk does come fast, and I don’t like the short cut over
the mesa then. There are sometimes snakes.”
“I don’t mind snakes,” I replied: “they add a spice. But if the way
by the road is longer, I am for the road.”
V
CORNELIA’S RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
After we had started toward Santo Espiritu, a delicate rosy afterglow
succeeded the abrupt gray interval, but our backs were now turned
upon it, and we only glanced at it now and then over our shoulders.
“The silence said to me,” Cornelia resumed, “that I had been a very
foolish woman, because I had expected of a human companionship
an intimacy of sympathy and understanding which only a Divine
companionship can give.”
“How do you know, Cornelia? How do you know?”
“I don’t know how it is with you—with men. Maybe a man can fill his
life so full of the things he is doing—with work and ambition and
the improvement of the world—that he doesn’t have to have an ‘inner
life.’ For me, for most women, there has to be an inner life. We live
so much in our personal relations; and I, at any rate, can’t live my
life unless I feel every day, all the time, my relation to something
that is peaceful and beautiful and good, and that doesn’t change.”
“Have you really found it? Are you really happy—Bluebird?”
“I like to have you call me Bluebird,” she said. “I feel like one. I
have never been so happy in my life as in this last month, since I
have learned to keep the mood, the adorable mood, of the silence here
by the sea.”
“I guess,” I said, “I caught a bit of it—your mood, to-night. But
I know it won’t stay. It’s a mood that I can’t count on. And I
don’t have it—often. Perhaps my setting isn’t right. At any rate I
don’t seem able to establish the relations which you think are so
important. So, with me, the mood is a lovely fugitive.”
“I have it all the time,” said Cornelia eagerly, “since I began to
fill, really fill, my life with the things I love, and to leave the
rest out: walking alone on the mesa; and being with the children; and
talking with my sister and Mr. Blakewell (he’s really a most unusual
young man); and going to church in the dear little church here in La
Jolla. I always liked to go to church: it made everything seem so
certain and peaceful afterward—till Oliver and the children began to
argue. And I liked religious music and the little choir boys in white
and the lovely procession of them singing. It put me into a frame of
mind that I knew was right, because it harmonized perfectly with all
the things that I wanted to have in my mind, and it shut the other
things out.”
“When did this new mood begin?” I questioned.
“It wasn’t,” she said, “a very serious matter with me till this last
spring. Other things than attending church had put me in the same
frame of mind. But after our trouble began and especially after
Oliver—went to Paris, and I felt so desperately isolated, isolated
inside, I mean, I went to church very regularly, and I began to
attend early communion, and often to go into the cathedral and sit
for half an hour when no one was there. And by and by the horrible
sense of isolation left me. Something came in and filled up the
vacancy. I couldn’t see just why—nothing had changed; and in the
first month after he left, I hadn’t heard a word from Oliver except
by his postcards to the children, but somehow I didn’t care whether I
heard from Oliver or not; and somehow I was growing happy, positively
happy, and clear and certain in my own mind. The ‘mood’ stayed. I
know why, now; and now—you may think I am foolish, but now—I have
only to go into our little church and touch anything there, or just
sit still alone in the dusk, to feel ecstatically happy.”
“How do you explain it? I have never felt ecstatically happy, in
those circumstances.”
“I can’t tell you,” she replied. “The children want me to discuss
it. I don’t want to discuss it. The beautiful thing about it is that
it doesn’t have to be discussed. All I know is, that in this fixed
and blessed mood of mine I feel my life in relation with what hasn’t
changed and won’t change; and if one can only keep one’s life there,
what actually becomes of one, in ordinary personal relations, doesn’t
matter, simply doesn’t matter.”
“I felt that way once,” I said, “or something like that. It was when
I had ended a labor of ten years, and had written the last page of my
_Roman Epigraphy_. I didn’t care for several days whether I lived or
died, after that. ‘All the best of me,’ I said to myself, ‘is there,
exempted from time, safe in that book.’ But I found that I couldn’t
get my table companions at the University Club to take that view.
When it was published, not a soul of them read a word of my ‘best.’
They seemed still to prefer the worst of me, the mere empty shell
from which the oyster had been extracted—and canned.”
Cornelia looked at me gravely. “You are jesting,” she said. “Please
don’t. I am in earnest. When I step into our little church, I say
to myself, ‘Cornelia, what you really care for is safe here. You
don’t need to worry because other people don’t agree with you, and
don’t value what you value.’ And then the final responsibility, for
everything, seems to slip so blissfully from my shoulders, and to
be accepted by a Power so much stronger and surer than myself, that
sometimes I envy the white-cowled peaceful-faced women who have gone
into the Church and closed the door behind them.”
“You would have to leave Dorothy and Oliver behind you,” I said, “if
you did that; and they are worth saving, too. My dear Cornelia, I am
afraid this ‘blessed mood’ is a little dangerous to you, and very
dangerous to the rest of us. Don’t wrap it too closely around you. I
knew a woman once who never gave her husband any occasion for anxiety
about any other man, but she fell so much in love with her clothes
that she became inaccessible to him, and finally made him frantically
jealous—jealous of her necklace and of her gowns.”
“Do you think I am really like that?”
“No, but that is a parable. You are becoming very fond of Church
clothes. You are so ‘dressy’ that you have become a little
inaccessible to the children, already—to their sympathies, I mean.
They are essentially so informal, you see. They don’t understand
you. I do understand you—somewhat. And what I understand chills me a
little. I understand you to be on the verge of losing heart over the
problem of reconciling yourself to the undistinguished mixture of
life. Your son would say that you have the ‘retreat-complex.’”
“I’m sure I don’t know what he would mean by that. What do you mean
by it?”
“I understand you to be on the point of making a mystical surrender
of your personality—on the verge of lapsing into a beatific mood
which will separate you still farther from Oliver—and from me, and
will ensure you against the pain and bitterness of reality. If you
should surrender and really become spiritual, like Father Blakewell,
or saintly, like no one of my acquaintance, you would drop out and
desert us. If you became saintly, which Heaven forbid, your character
would melt away like a little cloud in the moonlight. Your charm for
me, for all of us, is in the definiteness of your personality, the
clearness and distinction of your individuality. You are piquant
and delightful because you are a challenge, a whiff of the wind, a
counterblast. You have the ‘fighting edge.’”
Cornelia smiled as if she were recalling something sweet. “I am a
little tired just now,” she said, “of fighting. There are pleasanter
things than that. I want to surrender and repent.”
“Repent of what?”
“Oh, of being worldly, you might call it.”
“Please postpone that till you are ninety. You mustn’t repent yet.
Do you know, I used to think scornfully of deathbed repentances, but
now I think I was wrong; a deathbed is the place for repentance; and
the Catholic Church and the Gospels are right in welcoming those who
turn up at the eleventh hour. In fact, I half suspect—if we were
put into the world to see what we can make of it, and I don’t know
any other good reason for our presence here—I half suspect that God
Himself admires most those who ‘surrender’ to Him only with their
last breath.”
“How perfectly shocking!” exclaimed Cornelia. “What can you mean by
such absurdity?”
“By surrendering, I mean throwing yourself on God before you have
exhausted every possibility of making sense out of the world for
yourself. Perhaps there will come a time for you and for me when
there will be wisdom in such a surrender. But for young people, and
for people at our time of life, too, there is, there ought to be,
something repugnant in losing one’s intellectual grip, in letting
go, in abandoning the effort to find right relations with realities,
in giving up the attempt to make a little cosmos out of the chaotic
materials at hand. To my mind, it is the unpardonable sin against the
Holy Ghost to desert that fine heartbreaking task in order to take
refuge in a mood of mystical ‘peace without victory,’ peace without
substance. Your son would smile at my use of religious phraseology
and ‘mythological bunk.’ But he would understand, I think,—with a
little explanation, anyway,—precisely what I mean by not surrendering
to God till the last breath.”
“The children’s ideas of religion at present,” said Cornelia, “are
simply heathenish. Will you believe what Oliver said to Mr. Blakewell
the other day? He said something like this: ‘God? What is God? God
is a short word composed of three sounds: a guttural, a vowel, and a
dental!’”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” I ventured.
“I’m sure I don’t know. But just imagine a boy of nineteen saying a
thing like that! No wonder everyone is dismayed at the disappearance
of religion among the younger generation.”
“My dear Cornelia,” I replied, “religion itself, as some one has
said, is one of the most lovable things in the world. The word
sometimes becomes obnoxious and is avoided by young people; the thing
itself doesn’t disappear. The word ‘God’ is a symbol for one of the
great ideas in the world. The word sometimes acquires obnoxious
associations; but young people do not lose interest in the idea which
it represents. God and religion are, and always will be, popular, in
the best sense, because they come, offering to do for young and old
what old and young desire above everything else should be done for
them.”
“Well? What horrid paradox next?”
“Not a paradox at all. What everyone desires most in the world is:
to be taken seriously. That is what I want, from you. That is what
Oliver wants, from his parents. That is what His Excellency wants,
perhaps from someone else. That is what you wanted, I suppose, from
His Excellency. But none of us, apparently, is quite willing to
perform that great boon for any of the others. God and religion take
all men and every man seriously. That is why they have such power
of conferring happiness that they could never fall into disrespect
if the guttural and vowel and dental which we have just referred to
did not, when uttered together, often call into consciousness the
obnoxious things which we don’t believe in instead of the desirable
things which we do believe in.”
“I don’t quite understand you.”
“Why, I mean that at various times of life and at various ages of the
world people get together all the things that they believe necessary
and desirable, and then they say that God, meaning all the beneficent
power anywhere in the universe, is interested in preserving and
forwarding those things.”
“Yes; and then what?”
“And then people acquire a fresh stock of information—about
geology and hygiene and economics and slavery and intoxication and
sovereignty and war and Asiatics and international relations and
so forth. In consequence, they are forced gradually to revise, in
the light of their new information, their lists of things which are
necessary and desirable. Your son Oliver is busy at just that task
now; and he needs a lot of help and sympathy.”
“Oliver is really a dear boy,” said Cornelia, “and I am helping him
all I can. We are reading Newman; and I hope by and by to get him to
listen to a little of the _Imitation_, at breakfast.”
“You would do much better,” I said, “to read with him John Morley’s
_Compromise_ or Santayana’s _Poetry and Religion_. Nothing will so
decisively check, just now, the growth in him of a religious sense
as any attempt to persuade him that the beneficent powers in the
universe are pleased with ascetic withdrawals from life, or that they
countenance authoritative limitations on the use of the intelligence.”
“But isn’t Morley an atheist?” inquired Cornelia.
I ignored the question, for it was growing dark between the walls of
the little valley, and we were entering the deeper darkness of the
trees on the domain of Santo Espiritu.
“Oliver,” I said, “is reaching out into the real world, into his
own times, and gathering up here and there, without very much high
counsel, everything that, as he puts it, sounds good to him. That
is going to be the substance of his religion; that will be what he
believes in. Whether this collection of his beliefs will acquire
for him the compulsion and animating power, the ‘psychological
efficacy’ of the religions which possess a great history and a great
poetry—that will depend on his imagination and on his susceptibility
to high and noble emotions. At present he strikes me as a fairly
cool-tempered and slightly cocky young positivist, unconscious that
he is building an altar, certainly expecting no fire from heaven to
light his sacrifice—rather disdainful, indeed, of all cults which
profess that they have come down out of the skies.”
“But why, why,” cried Cornelia, “does he disdain what comes down
out of the skies? That, for me, is the indispensable essence of
religion. That is what makes the difference between a house and a
church. Till it comes, there can be nothing sacramental. And unless
the sacramental element enters, there is nothing really binding and
obligatory and final in all this miscellaneous collection of beliefs.
And everything gets so ‘messy’ and so confused. And everyone picks
and chooses, and does just what he pleases. I don’t wish to pick and
choose—not about the really great things, I mean; I want those things
decided.”
We had been strolling slowly up through the deep night of the walnut
grove along the path which ends at the gate in the walled garden.
The darkness, which had made us almost invisible, had brought us
physically nearer together. Cornelia seldom takes anyone’s arm; she
likes to be free when she walks. But, in the obscurity, our swinging
hands occasionally brushed at our sides, with an effect—a mutual
effect, I believe—of merely instinctive or “animal” sympathy, which,
in me, was instantly heightened into a kind of aching tenderness.
At the same time I was conscious that our minds—what we call our
minds—had been moving at a widening distance. And now shafts of light
from the windows of Santo Espiritu cut across the path, and as we
neared the gate, we stepped into the soft radiant glow of the place,
and the color in the bluebird gown lived again. We hesitated, then
stopped, and a momentary silence fell on us once more. I pulled the
crushed and wilted heliotrope from my buttonhole, and inhaled the
faint fragrance, meant for my “time of day.” Then I said, with my
ultimate effort:—
“Cornelia, when one goes out at the church door, one enters the
universe. The only blessed mood that I know comes when I feel that
all the universe is holy. And a sacrament, as I understand it, makes
not merely the difference between a house and a church; it makes also
the difference between a house and a home. When the world is before
one, where to choose, as it is for every one of us since Adam’s
day, don’t we have to pick and choose—even about the ‘really great
things’? Like, for example, how we are going to spend what remains,
at our time of life, of our poor little hungry human lives?”
“No,” Cornelia replied. “No; for me, there is no choice at all about
those things. Everything is perfectly clear to me now. I am going to
spend mine with Oliver. The reason why Oliver and I rasped so upon
one another last spring was that we were too near together, with no
point of contact but our miserable nerves. I have been learning this
summer how to ‘carry on’ with Oliver. When we are together again in
the fall, I shall not live with him, any more than I have for years.
I shall live in my blessed mood—in my secret garden. And I shall be
happy again, perfectly happy.”
“And I?”
“You are an old dear!” she said. “A very dear old dear! Come now,
let’s go in.” She seized my hand gayly, like a child, and opened
the gate, and led me through the walled garden, damp with the
spraying fountain, into the bright colorful patio, fragrant with
the cedar-wood fire. The mah jongg game was still in progress but
Father Blakewell and Cornelia’s sister relinquished their places and
withdrew. We played for an hour with the children. Cornelia, who sat
opposite me, drew all the “honors” and “wooed” with hands full of
seasons and dragons, while I steadily failed to complete my sequences
and ended the evening with four winds, one of each kind, on my hands.
When we broke up for the night, Cornelia unfolded a plan for my
assisting Mr. Blakewell with tutoring the children several hours a
day for the next two weeks; and, as a matter of fact, we adhered
strictly to the programme.
* * * * *
They gave me a cool bed in the guest-chamber, with a couch, at my
discretion, prepared on the flat roof above, to which a staircase
inside my room gave access. I chose the bed on the roof. I lay awake
there for a long time, studying the constellations and the star
clusters of the Milky Way, and recalling how, in the summer before,
after the little flurry over the bobbed hair had kindled in my heart
a faint flicker of hope, I had gone out at midnight with a strong
field-glass, and had lain for hours in the ferns, trying in vain
what I had often heard could easily be accomplished—to disjoint and
separate the double stars.
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