Beyond the range of hills rising from the far side of the Ashuela was the
wide valley in which was situated the Cloverdale Country Club, with its
polo field, golf course and tennis courts; and in this same valley some
of our wealthy citizens, such as Howard Ogilvy and Leonard Dickinson, had
bought "farms," week-end playthings for spring and autumn. Hambleton
Durrett had started the fashion. Capriciously, as he did everything else,
he had become the owner of several hundred acres of pasture, woodland and
orchard, acquired some seventy-five head of blooded stock, and proceeded
to house them in model barns and milk by machinery; for several months he
had bored everyone in the Boyne Club whom he could entice into
conversation on the subject of the records of pedigreed cows, and spent
many bibulous nights on the farm in company with those parasites who
surrounded him when he was in town. Then another interest had intervened;
a feminine one, of course, and his energies were transferred (so we
understood) to the reconstruction and furnishing of a little residence in
New York, not far from Fifth Avenue. The farm continued under the expert
direction of a superintendent who was a graduate of the State
Agricultural College, and a select clientele, which could afford to pay
the prices, consumed the milk and cream and butter. Quite consistent with
their marital relations was the fact that Nancy should have taken a fancy
to the place after Ham's interest had waned. Not that she cared for the
Guernseys, or Jerseys, or whatever they may have been; she evinced a
sudden passion for simplicity,--occasional simplicity, at least,--for a
contrast to and escape from a complicated life of luxury. She built
another house for the superintendent banished him from the little
farmhouse (where Ham had kept two rooms); banished along with the
superintendent the stiff plush furniture, the yellow-red carpets, the
easels and the melodeon, and decked it out in bright chintzes, with
wall-papers to match, dainty muslin curtains, and rag-carpet rugs on the
hardwood floors. The pseudo-classic porch over the doorway, which had
suggested a cemetery, was removed, and a wide piazza added, furnished
with wicker lounging chairs and tables, and shaded with gay awnings.
Here, to the farm, accompanied by a maid, she had been in the habit of
retiring from time to time, and here she came in early July. Here,
dressed in the simplest linen gowns of pink or blue or white, I found a
Nancy magically restored to girlhood,--anew Nancy, betraying only traces
of the old, a new Nancy in a new Eden. We had all the setting, all the
illusion of that perfect ideal of domesticity, love in a cottage. Nancy
and I, who all our lives had spurned simplicity, laughed over the joy we
found in it: she made a high art of it, of course; we had our simple
dinners, which Mrs. Olsen cooked and served in the open air; sometimes on
the porch, sometimes under the great butternut tree spreading its shade
over what in a more elaborate country-place, would have been called a
lawn,--an uneven plot of grass of ridges and hollows that ran down to the
orchard. Nancy's eyes would meet mine across the little table, and often
our gaze would wander over the pastures below, lucent green in the level
evening light, to the darkening woods beyond, gilt-tipped in the setting
sun. There were fields of ripening yellow grain, of lusty young corn that
grew almost as we watched it: the warm winds of evening were heavy with
the acrid odours of fecundity. Fecundity! In that lay the elusive yet
insistent charm of that country; and Nancy's, of course, was the
transforming touch that made it paradise. It was thus, in the country, I
suggested that we should spend the rest of our existence. What was the
use of amassing money, when happiness was to be had so simply?
"How long do you think you could stand it?" she asked, as she handed me a
plate of blackberries.
"Forever, with the right woman," I announced.
"How long could the woman stand it?".... She humoured, smilingly, my
crystal-gazing into our future, as though she had not the heart to
deprive me of the pleasure.
"I simply can't believe in it, Hugh," she said when I pressed her for an
answer.
"Why not?"
"I suppose it's because I believe in continuity, I haven't the romantic
temperament,--I always see the angel with the flaming sword. It isn't
that I want to see him."
"But we shall redeem ourselves," I said. "It won't be curiosity and
idleness. We are not just taking this thing, and expecting to give
nothing for it in return."
"What can we give that is worth it?" she exclaimed, with one of her
revealing flashes.
"We won't take it lightly, but seriously," I told her. "We shall find
something to give, and that something will spring naturally out of our
love. We'll read together, and think and plan together."
"Oh, Hugh, you are incorrigible," was all she said.
The male tendency in me was forever strained to solve her, to deduce from
her conversation and conduct a body of consistent law. The effort was
useless. Here was a realm, that of Nancy's soul, in which there was
apparently no such thing as relevancy. In the twilight, after dinner, we
often walked through the orchard to a grassy bank beside the little
stream, where we would sit and watch the dying glow in the sky. After a
rain its swollen waters were turbid, opaque yellow-red with the clay of
the hills; at other times it ran smoothly, temperately, almost clear
between the pasture grasses and wild flowers. Nancy declared that it
reminded her of me. We sat there, into the lush, warm nights, and the
moon shone down on us, or again through long silences we searched the
bewildering, starry chart of the heavens, with the undertones of the
night-chorus of the fields in our ears. Sometimes she let my head rest
upon her knee; but when, throbbing at her touch, with the life-force
pulsing around us, I tried to take her in my arms, to bring her lips to
mine, she resisted me with an energy of will and body that I could not
overcome, I dared not overcome. She acknowledged her love for me, she
permitted me to come to her, she had the air of yielding but never
yielded. Why, then, did she allow the words of love to pass? and how draw
the line between caresses? I was maddened and disheartened by that
elusive resistance in her--apparently so frail a thing!--that neither
argument nor importunity could break down. Was there something lacking in
me? or was it that I feared to mar or destroy the love she had. This,
surely, had not been the fashion of other loves, called unlawful, the
classic instances celebrated by the poets of all ages rose to mock me.
"Incurably romantic," she had called me, in calmer moments, when I was
able to discuss our affair objectively. And once she declared that I had
no sense of tragedy. We read "Macbeth" together, I remember, one rainy
Sunday. The modern world, which was our generation, would seem to be cut
off from all that preceded it as with a descending knife. It was
precisely from "the sense of tragedy" that we had been emancipated: from
the "agonized conscience," I should undoubtedly have said, had I been
acquainted then with Mr. Santayana's later phrase. Conscience--the old
kind of conscience,--and nothing inherent in the deeds themselves, made
the tragedy; conscience was superstition, the fear of the wrath of the
gods: conscience was the wrath of the gods. Eliminate it, and behold!
there were no consequences. The gods themselves, that kind of gods,
became as extinct as the deities of the Druids, the Greek fates, the
terrible figures of German mythology. Yes, and as the God of Christian
orthodoxy.
Had any dire calamities overtaken the modern Macbeths, of whose personal
lives we happened to know something? Had not these great ones broken with
impunity all the laws of traditional morality? They ground the faces of
the poor, played golf and went to church with serene minds, untroubled by
criticism; they appropriated, quite freely, other men's money, and some
of them other men's wives, and yet they were not haggard with remorse.
The gods remained silent. Christian ministers regarded these modern
transgressors of ancient laws benignly and accepted their contributions.
Here, indeed, were the supermen of the mad German prophet and philosopher
come to life, refuting all classic tragedy. It is true that some of these
supermen were occasionally swept away by disease, which in ancient days
would have been regarded as a retributive scourge, but was in fact
nothing but the logical working of the laws of hygiene, the result of
overwork. Such, though stated more crudely, were my contentions when
desire did not cloud my brain and make me incoherent. And I did not fail
to remind Nancy, constantly, that this was the path on which her feet had
been set; that to waver now was to perish. She smiled, yet she showed
concern.
"But suppose you don't get what you want?" she objected. "What then?
Suppose one doesn't become a superman? or a superwoman? What's to happen
to one? Is there no god but the superman's god, which is himself? Are
there no gods for those who can't be supermen? or for those who may
refuse to be supermen?"
To refuse, I maintained, were a weakness of the will.
"But there are other wills," she persisted, "wills over which the
superman may conceivably have no control. Suppose, for example, that you
don't get me, that my will intervenes, granting it to be conceivable that
your future happiness and welfare, as you insist, depend upon your
getting me--which I doubt."
"You've no reason to doubt it."
"Well, granting it, then. Suppose the orthodoxies and superstitions
succeed in inhibiting me. I may not be a superwoman, but my will, or my
conscience, if you choose, may be stronger than yours. If you don't get
what you want, you aren't happy. In other words, you fail. Where are your
gods then? The trouble with you, my dear Hugh, is that you have never
failed," she went on, "you've never had a good, hard fall, you've always
been on the winning side, and you've never had the world against you. No
wonder you don't understand the meaning and value of tragedy."
"And you?" I asked.
"No," she agreed, "nor I. Yet I have come to feel, instinctively, that
somehow concealed in tragedy is the central fact of life, the true
reality, that nothing is to be got by dodging it, as we have dodged it.
Your superman, at least the kind of superman you portray, is petrified.
Something vital in him, that should be plastic and sensitive, has turned
to stone."
"Since when did you begin to feel this?" I inquired uneasily.
"Since--well, since we have been together again, in the last month or
two. Something seems to warn me that if we take--what we want, we shan't
get it. That's an Irish saying, I know, but it expresses my meaning. I
may be little, I may be superstitious, unlike the great women of history
who have dared. But it's more than mere playing safe--my instinct, I
mean. You see, you are involved. I believe I shouldn't hesitate if only
myself were concerned, but you are the uncertain quantity--more uncertain
than you have any idea; you think you know yourself, you think you have
analyzed yourself, but the truth is, Hugh, you don't know the meaning of
struggle against real resistance."