and I can’t help it--or, rather, I’ve probably brought it about. But
when I tell you that I’m not that sort myself, and that I loved them
both dearly and liked immensely to be with them, you’ll reconsider a
little, I hope. They were sweet and straight and generous, both of
them, and they knew all about the grand manner. The grand manner is the
most comfortable thing to live with that I know. I used to go there a
good deal, and Arnold Withrow went even more than I did, though he
wasn’t even hanging on to Art by the eyelids as I do. (I refer, of
course, to my little habit of writing for the best magazines, whose
public considers me intellectual. So I seem to myself, in the
magazines.... “But out in pantry, good Lord!” Anyhow, I generally knew
at least what the Somerses were talking about--the dears!) Withrow was a
stock-broker, and always spent his vacation in the veritable wilds,
camping in virgin forests, or on the edge of glaciers, or in the dust of
American deserts. He had never been to Europe, but he had been to Buenos
Aires. You can imagine what Kathleen Somers and her father felt about
that: they thought him too quaint and barbaric for words; but still not
barbaric enough to be really interesting.
I was just beginning to suspect that Withrow was in love with Kathleen
Somers in the good old middle-class way, with no drama in it but no end
of devotion, when the crash came. Mr. Somers died, and within a month of
his death the railroad the bonds of which had constituted his long-since
diminished fortune went into the hands of a receiver. There were a
pitiful few hundreds a year left, besides the ancestral cottage--which
had never even been worth selling. His daughter had had an operation,
and the shock of that, _plus_ the shock of his death, _plus_ the shock
of her impoverishment, brought the curtain down with a tremendous rush
that terrified the house. It may make my metaphor clearer if I put it
that it was the asbestos curtain which fell suddenly and violently; not
the great crimson drop that swings gracefully down at the end of a play.
It did not mark the end; it marked a catastrophe in the wings to which
the plot must give place.
Then they carried Kathleen Somers to the hills.
It was Mildred Thurston who told me about it first. Withrow would have
rushed to the hills, I think, but he was in British Columbia on an
extended trip. He had fought for three months and got them, and he
started just before Kathleen Somers had her sudden operation. Mildred
Thurston (Withrow’s cousin, by the way) threw herself nobly into the
breach. I am not going into the question of Mildred Thurston here.
Perhaps if Withrow had been at home, she wouldn’t have gone. I don’t
know. Anyhow, when she rushed to Kathleen Somers’s desolate retreat she
did it, apparently, from pure kindness. She was sure, like every one
else, that Kathleen would die; and that belief purged her, for the time
being, of selfishness and commonness and cheap gayety. I wouldn’t take
Mildred Thurston’s word about a state of soul; but she was a good
dictagraph. She came back filled with pity; filled, at least, with the
means of inspiring pity for the exile in others.
After I had satisfied myself that Kathleen Somers was physically on the
mend, eating and sleeping fairly, and sitting up a certain amount, I
proceeded to more interesting questions.
“What is it like?”
“It’s dreadful.”
“How dreadful?”
Mildred’s large blue eyes popped at me with sincere sorrow.
“Well, there’s no plumbing, and no furnace.”
“Is it in a village?”
“It isn’t ‘in’ anything. It’s a mile and a half from a station called
Hebron. You have to change three times to get there. It’s half-way up a
hill--the house is--and there are mountains all about, and the barn is
connected with the house by a series of rickety woodsheds, and there are
places where the water comes through the roof. They put pails under to
catch it. There are queer little contraptions they call Franklin stoves
in most of the rooms and a brick oven in the kitchen. When they want
anything from the village, Joel Blake gets it, if he doesn’t forget.
Ditto wood, ditto everything except meat. Some other hick brings that
along when he has ‘killed.’ They can only see one house from the front
yard, and that is precisely a mile away by the road. Joel Blake lives
nearer, but you can’t see his house. You can’t see anything--except the
woods and the ‘crick’ and the mountains. You can see the farmers when
they are haying, but that doesn’t last long.”
“Is it a beautiful view?”
“My dear man, don’t ask me what a beautiful view is. My education was
neglected.”
“Does Kathleen Somers think it beautiful?”
“She never looks at it, I believe. The place is all run down, and she
sits and wonders when the wallpaper will drop off. At least, that is
what she talks about, when she talks at all. That, and whether Joel
Blake will remember to bring the groceries. The two women never speak to
each other. Kathleen’s awfully polite, but--well, you can’t blame her.
And I was there in the spring. What it will be in the winter!--But
Kathleen can hardly last so long, I should think.”
“Who is the other woman?”
“An heirloom. Melora Meigs. _Miss_ Meigs, if you please. You know Mr.
Somers’s aunt lived to an extreme old age in the place. Miss Meigs ‘did’
for her. And since then she has been living on there. No one wanted the
house--the poor Somerses!--and she was used to it. She’s an old thing
herself, and of course she hasn’t the nerves of a sloth. Now she ‘does’
for Kathleen. Of course later there’ll have to be a nurse again.
Kathleen mustn’t die with only Melora Meigs. I’m not sure, either, that
Melora will last. She’s all crooked over with rheumatism.”
That was the gist of what I got out of Mildred Thurston. Letters to Miss
Somers elicited no real response--only a line to say that she wasn’t
strong enough to write. None of her other female friends could get any
encouragement to visit her. It was perhaps due to Miss Thurston’s
mimicry of Melora Meigs--she made quite a “stunt” of it--that none of
them pushed the matter beyond the first rebuff.
By summer-time I began to get worried myself. Perhaps I was a little
worried, vicariously, for Withrow. Remember that I thought he cared for
her. Miss Thurston’s pity for Kathleen Somers was the kind that shuts
the door on the pitied person. If she had thought Kathleen Somers had a
future, she wouldn’t have been so kind. I may give it to you as my
private opinion that Mildred Thurston wanted Withrow herself. I can’t
swear to it, even now; but I suspected it sufficiently to feel that some
one, for Withrow’s sake, had better see Kathleen besides his exuberant
and slangy cousin. She danced a little too much on Kathleen Somers’s
grave. I determined to go myself, and not to take the trouble of asking
vainly for an invitation. I left New York at the end of June.
With my perfectly ordinary notions of comfort in travelling, I found
that it would take me two days to get to Hebron. It was beyond all the
resorts that people flock to: beyond, and “cross country” at that. I
must have journeyed on at least three small, one-track railroads, after
leaving the Pullman at some junction or other.
It was late afternoon when I reached Hebron; and nearly an hour later
before I could get myself deposited at Kathleen Somers’s door. There was
no garden, no porch; only a long, weed-grown walk up to a stiff front
door. An orchard of rheumatic apple-trees was cowering stiffly to the
wind in a far corner of the roughly fenced-in lot; there was a windbreak
of perishing pines.
In the living-room Kathleen Somers lay on a cheap wicker
_chaise-longue_, staring at a Hindu idol that she held in her thin
hands. She did not stir to greet me; only transferred her stare from the
gilded idol to dusty and ungilded me. She spoke, of course; the first
time in my life, too, that I had ever heard her speak ungently.
“My good man, you had better go away. I can’t put you up.”
That was her greeting. Melora Meigs was snuffling in the hallway
outside--listening, I suppose.
“Oh, yes, you can. If you can’t, I’m sure Joel Blake will. I’ve come to
stay a while, Miss Somers.”
“Can you eat porridge and salt pork for supper?”
“I can eat tenpenny nails, if necessary. Also I can sleep in the barn.”
“Melora!” The old woman entered, crooked and grudging of aspect. “This
friend of my father’s and mine has come to see me. Can he sleep in the
barn?”
I cannot describe the hostility with which Melora Meigs regarded me. It
was not a pointed and passionate hatred. That, one could have examined
and dealt with. It was, rather, a vast disgust that happened to include
me.
“There’s nothing to sleep on. Barn’s empty.”
“He could move the nurse’s cot out there, if he really wants to. And I
think there’s an extra washstand in the woodshed. You’ll hardly need
more than one chair, just for a night,” she finished, turning to me.
“Not for any number of nights, of course,” I agreed suavely. I was angry
with Kathleen Somers, I didn’t know quite why. I think it was the Hindu
idol. Nor had she any right to address me with insolence, unless she
were mad, and she was not that. Her eyes snapped very sanely. I don’t
think Kathleen Somers could have made her voice snap.
Melora Meigs grunted and left the room. The grunt was neither assent nor
dissent; it was only the most inclusive disapproval: the snarl of an
animal, proceeding from the topmost of many layers of dislike.
“I’ll move the things before dark, I think.” I was determined to be
cheerful, even if I had to seem impertinent; though the notion of her
sticking me out in the barn enraged me.
“You won’t mind Melora’s locking the door between, of course. We always
do. I’m such a cockney, I’m timid; and Melora’s very sweet about it.”
It was almost too much, but I stuck it out. Presently, indeed, I got my
way; and moved--yes, actually lugged and lifted and dragged--the cot,
the chair, and the stand out through the dusty, half-rotted corridors
and sheds to the barn. I drew water at the tap in the yard and washed my
perspiring face and neck. Then I had supper with Miss Somers and Melora
Meigs.
After supper my hostess lighted a candle. “We go to bed very early,” she
informed me. “I know you’ll be willing to smoke out-of-doors, it’s so
warm. I doubt if Melora could bear tobacco in the house. And you won’t
mind her locking up early. You can get into the barn from the yard any
time, of course. Men are never timid, I believe; but there’s a horn
somewhere, if you’d like it. We have breakfast at six-thirty.
Good-night.”
Yes, it was Kathleen Somers’s own voice, saying these things to me. I
was still enraged, but I must bide my time. I refused the horn, and went
out into the rheumatic orchard to smoke in dappled moonlight. The pure
air soothed me; the great silence restored my familiar scheme of things.
Before I went to bed in the barn, I could see the humor of this sour
adventure. Oh, I would be up at six-thirty!
Of course I wasn’t. I overslept; and by the time I approached the house
(the woodshed door was still locked) their breakfast was long over. I
fully expected to fast until the mid-day meal, but Kathleen Somers
relented. With her own hands she made me coffee over a little alcohol
lamp. Bread and butter had been austerely left on the table. Miss Somers
fetched me eggs, which I ate raw. Then I went out into the orchard to
smoke.
When I came back, I found Miss Somers as she had been the day before,
crouched listlessly in her long chair, fondling her idol. I drew up a
horsehair rocking-chair and plunged in.
“Why do you play with that silly thing?”
“This?” She stroked the idol. “It is rather lovely. Father got it in
Benares. The carving is very cunningly done. Look at the nose and mouth.
The rank Hinduism of the thing amuses me. Perhaps it was cruel to bring
it up here where there are no other gods for it to play with. But it’s
all I’ve got. They had to sell everything, you know. When I get
stronger, I’ll send it back to New York and sell it, too.”
“Why did you keep it out of all the things you had?”
“I don’t know. I think it was the first thing we ever bought in India.
And I remember Benares with so much pleasure. Wasn’t it a pity we
couldn’t have been there when everything happened?”
“Much better not, I should think. You needed surgeons.”
“Just what I didn’t need! I should have liked to die in a country that
had something to say for itself. I don’t feel as though this place had
ever existed, except in some hideous dream.”
“It’s not hideous. It’s even very beautiful--so wild and untouched; such
lovely contours to the mountains.”
“Yes, it’s very untouched.” She spoke of it with just the same scorn I
had in old days heard her use for certain novelists. “Scarcely worth the
trouble of touching, I should think--shouldn’t you?”
“The beauty of it last night and this morning has knocked me over,” I
replied hardily.
“Oh, really! How very interesting!” By which she meant that she was not
interested at all.
“You mean that you would like it landscape-gardened?” Really, she was
perverse. She had turned her back to the view--which was ripping, out of
her northern window. I could tell that she habitually turned her back on
it.
“Oh, landscape-gardened? Well, it would improve it, no doubt. But it
would take generations to do it. The generations that have been here
already don’t seem to have accomplished much. Humanly speaking, they
have hardly existed at all.”
Kathleen Somers was no snob in the ordinary sense. She was an angel to
peasants. I knew perfectly what she meant by “humanly.” She meant there
was no castle on the next hill.
“Are you incapable of caring for Nature--just scenery?”
“Quite.” She closed her eyes, and stopped her gentle, even stroking of
the idol.
“Of course you never did see America first,” I laughed.
Kathleen Somers opened her eyes and spoke vehemently. “I’ve seen all
there is of it to see, in transit to better places. Seeing America
first! That can be borne. It’s seeing America last that kills me. Seeing
nothing else forever, till I die.”
“You don’t care for just beauty, regardless,” I mused.
“Not a bit. Not unless it has meant something to man. I’m a humanist,
I’m afraid.”
Whether she was gradually developing remorse for my night in the
cobwebby barn, I do not know. But anyhow she grew more gentle, from this
point on. She really condescended to expound.
“I’ve never loved Nature--she’s a brute, and crawly besides. It’s what
man has done with Nature that counts; it’s Nature with a human past.
Peaks that have been fought for, and fought on, crossed by the feet of
men, stared at by poets and saints. Most of these peaks aren’t even
named. Did you know that? Nature! What is Nature good for, I should like
to know, except to kill us all in the end? Don’t Ruskinize to me, my
dear man.”
“I won’t. I couldn’t. But, all the same, beauty is beauty, wherever and
whatever. And, look where you will here, your eyes can’t go wrong.”
“I never look. I looked when I first came, and the stupidity, the
emptiness, the mere wood and dirt and rock of it seemed like a personal
insult. I should prefer the worst huddle of a Chinese city, I verily
believe.”
“You’ve not precisely the spirit of the pioneer, I can see.”
“I should hope not. ‘But, God if a God there be, is the substance of
men, which is man.’ I have to stay in the man-made ruts. They’re sacred
to me. I’ll look with pleasure at the Alps, if only for the sake of
Hannibal and Goethe; but I never could look with pleasure at your
untutored Rockies. They’re so unintentional, you know. Nature is nothing
until history has touched her. And as for this geological display
outside my windows--you’ll kindly permit me to turn my back on it. It’s
not peevishness.” She lifted her hand protestingly. “Only, for weeks, I
stared myself blind to see the beauty you talk of. I can’t see it.
That’s honest. I’ve tried. But there is none that I can see. I am very
conventional, you know, very self-distrustful. I have to wait for a
Byron to show it to me. American mountains--poor hulking things--have
never had a poet to look at them. At least, Poe never wasted his time
that way. I don’t imagine that Poe would have been much happier here
than I am. I haven’t even the thrill of the explorer, for I’m not the
first one to see them. A few thin generations of people have stared at
these hills--and much the hills have done for them! Melora Meigs is the
child of these mountains; and Melora’s sense of beauty is amply
expressed in the Orthodox church in Hebron. This landscape, I assure
you”--she smiled--“hasn’t made good. So much for the view. It’s no use
to me, absolutely no use. I give you full and free leave to take it away
with you if you want it. And I don’t think the house is much better. But
I’m afraid I shall have to keep that for Melora Meigs and me to live
in.” It was her old smile. The bitterness was all in the words. No, it
was not bitterness, precisely, for it was fundamentally as impersonal as
criticism can be. You would have thought that the mountains were
low-brows. I forebore to mention her ancestors who had lived here: it
would have seemed like quibbling. They had created the situation; but
they had only in the most literal sense created her.
“Why don’t you get out?”
“I simply haven’t money enough to live anywhere else. Not money enough
for a hall bedroom. This place belongs to me; the taxes are nothing. The
good farming land that went with it was sold long since. And I’m afraid
I haven’t the strength to go out and work for a living. I’m very
ineffectual, besides. What could I do even if health returned to me?
I’ve decided it’s more decent to stay here and die on three dollars a
year than to sink my capital in learning stenography.”
“You could, I suppose, be a companion.” Of course I did not mean it, but
she took it up very seriously.
“The people who want companions wouldn’t want me. And the one thing this
place gives me is freedom--freedom to hate it, to see it intelligently
for what it is. I couldn’t afford my blessed hatreds if I were a
companion. And there’s no money in it, so that I couldn’t even plan for
release. It simply wouldn’t do.”
Well, of course it wouldn’t do. I had never thought it would. I tried
another opening.
“When is Withrow coming back?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him.” She might have been telling a
squirrel that she didn’t know where the other squirrel’s nuts were.
“He has been far beyond civilization, I know. But I dare say he’ll be
back soon. I hope you won’t put him in the barn. I don’t mind, of
course, but his feelings might be hurt.”
“I shall certainly not let him come,” she retorted. “He would have the
grace to ask first, you know.”
“I shall make a point of telling him you want him.” But even that could
strike no spark from her. She was too completely at odds with life to
care. I realized, too, after an hour’s talk with her, that I had better
go--take back my fine proposition about making a long visit. She reacted
to nothing I could offer. I talked of books and plays, visiting
virtuosos and picture exhibitions. Her comments were what they would
always have been, except that she was already groping for the cue. She
had been out of it for months; she had given up the fight. The best
things she said sounded a little stale and precious. Her wit perished in
the face of Nature’s stare. Nature was a lady she didn’t recognize: a
country cousin she’d never met. She couldn’t even “sit and play with
similes.” If she lived, she would be an old lady with a clever past: an
intolerable bore. But there was no need to look so far ahead. Kathleen
Somers would die.
Before dinner I clambered up or down (I don’t remember which) to a brook
and gathered a bunch of wild iris for her. She had loved flowers of old;
and how deftly she could place a spray among her treasures! She
shuddered. “Take those things away! How dare you bring It inside the
house?” By “It” I knew she meant the wild natural world. Obediently I
took the flowers out and flung them over the fence. I knew that Kathleen
Somers was capable of getting far more pleasure from their inimitable
hue than I; but even that inimitable hue was poisoned for her because it
came from the world that was torturing her--the world that beat upon her
windows, so that she turned her back to the day; that stormed her ears,
so that she closed them even to its silence; that surrounded her, so
that she locked every gate of her mind.
I left, that afternoon, very desolate and sorry. Certainly I could do
nothing for her. I had tried to shock her, stir her, into another
attitude, but in vain. She had been transplanted to a soil her tender
roots could not strike into. She would wither for a little under the
sky, and then perish. “If she could only have fallen in love!” I
thought, as I left her, huddled in her wicker chair. If I had been a
woman, I would have fled from Melora Meigs even into the arms of a
bearded farmer; I would have listened to the most nasal male the hills
had bred. I would have milked cows, to get away from Melora. But I am a
crass creature. Besides, what son of the soil would want her:
unexuberant, delicate, pleasant in strange ways, and foreign to all
familiar things? She wouldn’t even fall in love with Arnold Withrow, who
was her only chance. For I saw that Arnold, if he ever came, would,
fatally, love the place. She might have put up with the stock-broking,
but she never could have borne his liking the view. Yes, I was very
unhappy as I drove into Hebron; and when I finally achieved the Pullman
at the Junction, I was unhappier still. For I felt towards that Pullman
as the lost child feels towards its nurse; and I knew that Kathleen
Somers, ill, poor, middle-aged, and a woman, was a thousand times more
the child of the Pullman than I.
I have told this in detail, because I hate giving things at
second-hand. Yet there my connection with Kathleen Somers ceased, and
her tragedy deepened before other witnesses. She stayed on in her hills;
too proud to visit her friends, too sane to spend her money on a flying
trip to town, too bruised and faint to fight her fate. The only thing
she tried for was apathy. I think she hoped--when she hoped
anything--that her mind would go a little: not so much that she would
have to be “put away”; but just enough so that she could see things in a
mist--so that the hated hills might, for all she knew, be Alps, the
rocks turn into castles, the stony fields into vineyards, and Joel Blake
into a Tuscan. Just enough so that she could re-create her world from
her blessed memories, without any sharp corrective senses to interfere.
That, I am sure, was what she fixed her mind upon through the prolonged
autumn; bending all her frail strength to turn her brain ever so little
from its rigid attitude to fact. “Pretending” was no good: it maddened.
If her mind would only pretend without her help! That would be heaven,
until heaven really came.... You can’t sympathize with her, probably,
you people who have been bred up on every kind of Nature cult. I can
hear you talking about the everlasting hills. Don’t you see, that was
the trouble? Her carefully trained imagination was her religion, and in
her own way she was a ritualist. The mountains she faced were
unbaptized: the Holy Ghost had never descended upon them. She was as
narrow as a nun; but she could not help it. And remember, you practical
people who love woodchucks, that she had nothing but the view to make
life tolerable. The view was no mere accessory to a normal existence.
She lived, half-ill, in an ugly, not too comfortable cottage, as far as
the moon from any world she understood, in a solitude acidulated by
Melora Meigs. No pictures, no music, no plays, no talk--and this, the
whole year round. Would you like it yourselves, you would-be savages
with Adirondack guides? Books? Well: that was one of life’s little
stupidities. She couldn’t buy them, and no one knew what to send her.
Besides, books deferred the day when her mind should, ever so little, go
back on her. She didn’t encourage gifts of literature. She was no
philosopher; and an abstraction was of no use to her unless she could
turn it to a larger concreteness, somehow enhancing, let us say, a
sunset from the Acropolis. I never loved Kathleen Somers, as men love
women, but many a time that year I would have taken her burden on
myself, changed lives with her, if that had been possible. It never
could have been so bad for any of us as for her. Mildred Thurston would
have gone to the church sociables and flirted as grossly as Hebron
conventions permitted; I could have chopped wood. But to what account
could Kathleen Somers turn her martyrdom?