KAREN

Karen interested more by what she always seemed about to say and be

than by anything she was at the moment. I could never tell whether her

inscrutability was deliberate or whether she did not know how to be

articulate. When she was pleased she would gaze at you benignly but

there was always a slight uneasiness in the air as if the serenity

were only a resultant of tumultuous feelings that were struggling

to appreciate the situation. She was always most animated when she

was annoyed at you. At those times you could fairly feel the piquant

shafts of evil-heartedness hitting your body as she contended against

your egoism or any of the personal failings that hurt her sense of

your fitness. These moments took you into the presence of the somber

irascibility of that northern land from which she came, and you felt

her foreignness brush you. Her smooth, fair, parted hair would become

bristly and surly; that face, which looked in repose like some Madonna

which a Swedish painter would love, took on a flush; green lights

glanced from her eyes. She was as inscrutable in anger as she was in

her friendliness. You never knew just what strange personal freak of

your villainy had set it off, though you often found it ascribed to

some boiling fury in your own placid soul. You were not aware of this

fury, but her intuition for it made her more inscrutable than ever.

I first met Karen at a state university in the West where she had come

for some special work in literature, after a few years of earning her

living at browbeaten stenography. She never went to her classes, and

I had many long walks with her by the lake. In that somewhat thin

intellectual atmosphere of the college, she devoted most of her time to

the fine art of personal relations, and, as nobody who ever looked at

her was not fascinated by her blonde inscrutability and curious soft

intensity, she had no difficulty in soon enmeshing herself in several

nebulous friendships. She told us that she hoped eventually to write

novels, but there was never anything to show that her novels unfolded

anywhere but in her mind as they interpreted the richly exciting

detail of her daily personal contacts. If you asked her about her

writings, you became immediately thankful that looks could not slay,

and some witch-fearing ancestor crossed himself shudderingly in your

soul. Intercourse with Karen was not very concrete. Our innumerable

false starts at understanding, the violence and exact quality of my

interest, the technique of getting just that smooth and silky rapport

between us which she was always anticipating--this seemed to make

up the fabric of her thoughts. At that time she was reading mostly

George Moore and Henry James, and I think she hoped we would all prove

adequate for a subtly interwoven society. This was a little difficult

in a group that was proud of its modernities, of its dizzy walking

over flimsy generalizations, of its gifts of exploding in shrapnels of

epigram. Karen loathed ideas and often quoted George Moore on their

hideousness. The mere suggestion of an idea was so likely to destroy

the poise of her mood, that conversation became a strategy worth

working for. Karen did not think, she felt--in slow, sensuous outlines.

You could feel her feelings curiously putting out long streamers at

you, and, if you were in the mood, a certain subterranean conversation

was not impossible. But if you did not happen to guess her mood, then

you quarreled.

When I met Karen, she was twenty-five, and I guessed that she would

always be twenty-five. She had personal ideals that she wished for

herself, and if you asked what she was thinking about, it was quite

likely to be the kind of noble woman she was to be, or feared she would

not be, at forty. But she was too insistent upon creating her world

in her own image to remain sensitive to the impressions that make

for growth. As the story of her life came out, the bitter immigrant

journey, the despised house-work, the struggle to get an education,

the office drudgery, the lack of roots and a place, you came to

appreciate this personal cult of Karen’s. She was so clearly finer

and intenser than the people who had been in the world about her,

that her starved soul had to find nourishment where it could. Even

if she was insensible to ideas, her soft searching at least allured.

It was perhaps her starved condition which made her friendships so

subject to sudden disaster. Karen’s notes were always a little more

brightly intimate than her personal resources were able to support.

She seemed to start with a plan of the conversation in her head. If

you bungled, and with her little retreats and evasions you were always

bungling, you could feel her spirit stamp its feet in vexation. She

would plan pleasant soliloquies, and you would find yourself in a

fiercely cross-examinatory mood. She loathed your probing of her mood,

and parried you in a helpless way which made you feel as if you were

tearing tissue. You always seemed with Karen to be in a laboratory of

personal relations where priceless things were being discovered, but

you felt her more as an alchemist than a modern physicist of the soul,

and her method rather that of trial and error than real experiment.

I am quite sure that Karen’s system of personal relations was platonic.

She never seemed to get beyond that laying of the broad foundation of

the Jamesian tone that would have been necessary to make the thing an

“affair.” She was often lovely and she was not unloved. She was much

interested in men, but it was more as co-actors in a personal drama

of her own devising than as lovers or even as men. The most she ever

hoped for, I think, was to be the sacred fount, and to have her flow

copious and manifold. You felt the immense qualifications a man would

have to have in the subtleties of rapport to make him even a candidate

for loving. For Karen, men seemed to exist only as they brought a touch

of ceremonial into their personal relations. I think Karen never quite

intended to surround herself with the impenetrable armor of vestal

virginity, and yet she did not avoid it. However glowing and mysterious

she might look as she lay before the fire in her room, so that to an

impatient friend nothing might seem more important than to catch her

up warmly in his arms, he would have been an audacious brigand who

violated the atmosphere. Karen always so much gave the impression of

playing for higher and nobler stakes that no brigand ever appeared.

Whether she deluded herself as to what she wanted or whether she had

a clearer insight than most women into the predatoriness of my sex,

her relations with men were rarely smooth. Caddishness seemed to be

breaking out repeatedly in the most unexpected places.

Some of the most serious of my friends got dark inadequacies charged

against them by Karen. I was a little in her confidence, but I could

rarely gather more than that the men of to-day had no sensitiveness

and were far too coarse for the fine and decent friendships which she

spent so much of her time and artistic imagination on arranging for

them with herself. I was constantly undergoing, at the hands of Karen,

a course of discipline myself, for my ungovernable temper or my various

repellant “tones” or my failure to catch just the quality of certain

people we discussed. I understood dimly the lucklessness of her “cads.”

They had perhaps not been urbanely plastic, they had perhaps been

impatiently adoring. They had at least not offended in any of the usual

ways. She would even forgive them sometimes with surprising suddenness.

But she never so far forgot her principles as to let them dictate a

mood. She never recognized any of the naïve collisions of men and women.

Karen often seemed keenly to wonder at this unsatisfactoriness of men.

She cultivated them, walking always in her magic circle, but they

slipped and grew dimmer. She had her fling of feminism towards the end

of her year. She left the university to become secretary for a state

suffrage leader. Under the stress of public life she became fierce and

serious. She abandoned the picturesque peasant costumes which she had

affected, and made herself hideous in mannish skirts and waists. She

felt the woes of women, and saw everywhere the devilish hand of the

exploiting male. If she ever married, she would have a house separate

from her husband. She would be no parasite, no man’s woman. She spoke

of the “human sex,” and set up its norms for her acquaintanceships.

When I saw Karen later, however, she was herself again. She had taken

up again the tissue of personal relations. But in that reconstituted

world all her friends seemed to be women. Her taste of battle had

seemed to fortify and enlighten that ancient shrinking; her old

annoyance that men should be abruptly different from what she would

have them. She was intimate with feminists whose feminism had done

little more for their emotional life than to make them acutely

conscious of the cloven hoof of the male. Karen, in her brooding way,

was able to give this philosophy a far more poetical glamor than any

one I knew. Her woman friends adored her, even those who had not

acquired that mystic sense of “loyalty to woman” and did not believe

that no man was so worthy that he might not be betrayed with impunity.

Karen, on her part, adored her friends, and the care that had been

spent on unworthy men now went into toning up and making subtle the

women around her. She did a great deal for them, and was constantly

discovering godlike creatures in shop and street and bringing them in

to be mystically mingled with her circle.

Naturally it is Karen’s married friends who cause her greatest concern.

Eternal vigilance is the price of their salvation from masculine

tyranny. In the enemy’s country, under at least the nominal yoke, these

married girls seem to Karen subjects for her prayer and aid. She has

become exquisitely sensitive to any aggressive gestures on the part of

these creatures with whom her dear friends have so inexplicably allied

themselves, and she is constantly in little subtle intrigues to get the

victim free or at least armisticed. She broods over her little circle,

inscrutable, vigilant, a true vestal virgin on the sacred hearth of

woman. Husbands are doubtless better for that silent enemy whom they

see jealously adoring their wives.

Karen still leaves trails of mystery and desire where she goes, but

it is as a woman’s woman that I see her now, and, I am ashamed to

say, ignore her. Men could not be crowded into her Jamesian world and

she has solved the problem by obliterating them. She will not live by

means of them. Since she does not know how to live with them she lives

without them.