Your letters perplex me more and more, and I don't know at all how to
take them. Do you mean you are in love with me? I can't believe it. I
read and re-read your last three letters--such dear, odd, whimsical
letters!--so wonderfully written, so full of beauty and of poetry.
They do almost sound like love-letters--or at least as I imagine
love-letters are written. But they can't be! _How_ can they be?
And first of all, even if you meant them that way, I don't know what to
think. I've never been in love. I know how I feel about you--have
always felt. You know, too.
But you never gave me any reason to think--and I never dreamed of
thinking anything like _that_ when you were here. It never occurred to
me. It would not occur to me now except for your very beautiful
letters--so unlike you--so strangely sad, so whimsical, so skillful in
wonderful phrases that they're like those vague prose poems you sent me,
which hint enough to awaken your imagination and set you aflame with
curiosity.
But you _can't_ mean that you're in love with me. I should be too
astonished. Besides, I shouldn't know what to do about it. It wouldn't
seem real. I never have thought of you in such a way.
What makes a girl fall in love? Do you know? Could she fall in love
with a man through his letters because they are so beautiful and sad and
elusive, so full of charm and mystery? I'm in love with _them_. But,
Jim, I don't know what to think about you. I'd have to see you again,
first, anyway. You are such a dear boy! I can't seem to think of you
that way. You know it's a different kind of love, ours. All I can think
about it is the tremendous surprise--if it's true.
But I don't believe it is. You are lonely; you miss dad--miss me,
perhaps. I think you do miss me, for the first time in your life. You
see, I have rather a clear mind and memory, and I can't help remembering
that when you were here you certainly could not have felt that way
toward me; so how can you now? I did bore you sometimes.
Anyway, I adore you with all my heart, as you know. My affection hasn't
changed one bit since I was a tiny girl and came into your room that day
and saw you down on the floor unpacking your suit-case. I adored you
instantly. I have not changed. Girls don't change.
Another letter from her some months later:
You're such a funny boy--just a boy, still, while in these six months
I've overtaken and passed you in years. You won't believe it, but I
have. Maturity has overtaken me. I am really a real woman.
Why are your letters vaguely reproachful? Have I done anything? Were
you annoyed when I asked you whether you meant me to take them as love
letters? You didn't write for a month after that. Did I scare you?
You _are_ funny!
I do really think you _are_ in love--not with me, Jim--not with any
other particular girl--but just in love with love. Writers and artists
and poets are inclined to that sort of thing, I fancy.
That's what worries me about myself; I am not inclined that way; I don't
seem to be artistic enough in temperament to pay any attention to
sentiment of that sort. I don't desire it; I don't miss it; it simply
is not an item in the list of things that interest me. But of all
things in the world, I do adore friendship.
I had an afternoon off from the hospital the other day--I'm still a
probationer in a pink and white uniform, you know--and I went up to town
and flew about the shops and lunched with a college friend, Helen Davis,
at the Ritz and had a wonderful time.
And who do you suppose I ran into? Oswald Grismer! Jim, he certainly is
the best-looking fellow--such red-gold hair,--such fascinating golden
eyes and colouring.
We chatted most amiably and he took us to tea, and then--I suppose it
wasn't conventional--but we went to his studio with him, Helen Davis and
I.
He _is_ the cleverest man! He has done a delightful fountain and
several portrait busts, and a beautiful tomb for the Lidsey family, and
his studies in wax and clay are wonderful!
He really seems very nice. And the life he leads is heavenly! Such a
wonderful way to live--just a bed-room and the studio.
He's going to give a little tea for me next time I have an afternoon
off, and I'm to meet a lot of delightful, unconventional people
there--painters, writers, actors--people who have _done_ things!--I'm
sure it will be wonderful.
I have bought five pounds of plasticine and I'm going to model in it in
my room every time I have a few moments to myself. But oh, it does
smell abominably, and it ruins your finger nails.
After that, Oswald Grismer's name recurred frequently in her letters.
Cleland recognized also the names of several old schoolmates of his as
figuring at various unconventional ceremonies in Grismer's studio--Harry
Belter, now a caricaturist on the New York _Morning Star_; Badger Spink,
drawing for the illustrated papers; Clarence Verne, who painted pretty
girls for the covers of popular magazines, and his one-time master, Phil
Grayson, writer for the better-class periodicals.
It's delightful, she wrote; we sometimes have music--often celebrated
people from the Metropolitan Opera drop in and you meet everybody of
consequence you ever heard of outside the Social Register--people famous
in their professions--and it is exciting and inspiring and fills me with
enthusiasm and desire to amount to something.
Of course there are _all_ kinds, Jim; but I'm old enough and experienced
enough to know how to take care of myself. Intellectuals are, of course,
broad, liberal and impatient of petty conventions: they live for their
professions, regardless of orthodox opinion, oblivious of narrow-minded
Philistines.
The main idea is to be tolerant. That is the greatest thing in the
world, tolerance. I may not care to smoke cigarettes myself or drink
cocktails and highballs, but if another girl does it it's none of my
business. That is the foundation of the unconventional and intellectual
world--freedom and tolerance of other people's opinions and behaviour.
_That_ is democracy!
As for the futurists and symbolists of various schools, I am not narrow
enough, I hope, to ridicule them or deny them the right to
self-expression, but I am not in sympathy with them. However, it is
most interesting to listen to their views.
Well, these delightful treats are rare events in my horridly busy life.
I'm in the infirmary and the hospital almost all the time; I'm always on
duty or studying or attending lectures and clinics. I don't faint any
more. And the poor little sufferers fill my heart with sympathy. I do
love children--even defective ones. It makes me furious that there
should be any. We must regulate this some day. And regulate birth
control, too.
It is interesting; I am rather glad that I shall have had this
experience. As a graduate nurse, some day, I shall add immensely to my
own self-respect and self-confidence. But I should never pursue the
profession further; never study medicine; never desire to become a
professional physician. The minute I graduate I shall rent a studio and
start in to find out what most properly shall be my vehicle for
self-expression.
I forgot to tell you that Oswald Grismer's father and mother are dead
within a week of each other. Pneumonia! Poor boy, he is stunned. He
wrote me. He won't give any every second to creative work without a
thought of financial gain.
Harry Belter is such a funny, fat man. He asks after you every time I
meet him. I sent you some of his cartoons in the _Star_. Badger Spink
is an odd sort of man with his big, boyish figure and his mass of
pompadour hair and his inextinguishable energy and amazing talent. He
draws, draws, draws all the time; you see his pictures in every
periodical; yet he seems to have time for all sorts of gaiety, private
theatricals, dances, entertainments. He belongs to tie Players, the Ten
Cent Club, the Dutch Treat, Illustrators, Lotus, Coffee House, Two by
Four--and about a hundred others--and I think he's president of most of
them. He _always_ sends his regards to you and requests to know whether
you're not yet fed up with Latin Quarter stuff--whatever that means!
And Clarence Verne always mentions you. Such a curious man with a face
like Pharaoh, and Egyptian hands, too, deeply cut in between thumb and
forefinger like the hands of people sculptured in bas reliefs on
Egyptian tombs.
But such lovely girls he paints!--so exquisite! He is a very odd
man--with a fixed gaze, and speaks as though he were a trifle deaf--or
drugged, or something....
You haven't said much about yourself, Jim, in your last letters; and
also your letters arrive at longer and longer intervals.
Somehow, I think that you are becoming reconciled to Paris. I don't
believe you feel very lonely any longer. But _what_ do you do to amuse
yourself after your hours of work are ended? And who are your new
friends over there? For, of course, you must have made new friends--I
don't mean the students whose names you have occasionally mentioned.
Haven't you met any nice girls?
He did not mention having met any girls, nice or otherwise, when he
wrote again. He did say that he was enjoying his work and that he had
begun to feel a certain affection for Paris--particularly after he had
been away travelling in Germany, Spain and Italy. Really, he admitted,
it was like coming home. The usual was still happening to James
Cleland.
He had an apartment, now, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens. He had
friends to dinner sometimes. There was always plenty to do. Life had
become very inspiring. The French theatres were a liberal education;
French literature a miracle of artistic clarity and a model for all
young aspirants. In fact, the spring source of all art was France, and
Paris the ornamental fountain jet from which flashed the ever-living
waters that all may quaff.
Very pretty. He did not add that some of the waters were bottled and
kept in pails of chopped ice. He wrote many gracefully composed
pages--when he wrote at all--concerning the misty beauty of the French
landscape and the effect of the rising sun of Notre Dame. He had seen
it rise several times.
But, on the whole, he behaved discreetly and with much circumspection;
and within his youthful heart lay that deathless magic of the creative
mind which transmutes leaden reality into golden romance--which is blind
to the sordid and which transforms it into the picturesque.
A saucy smile from a pretty girl on an April day germinated into a
graceful string of verses by night; a chance encounter by the Seine, a
laugh, a gay adieu--and a delicate short story was born, perhaps to be
laboured over and groomed and swaddled and nourished into life--or to be
abandoned, perhaps, in the back yard of literary debris.
Life ran evenly and pleasantly for Cleland in those deathless
days--light, happy, irresponsible days when idleness becomes saturated
with future energy unawares; when the seeds of inspiration fall thicker
and thicker and take root; when the liberality, the vastness, and the
inspiration of the world begin to dawn upon a youthful intellect, not
oppressively, but with a wide and reassuring kindliness.
There was a young girl--very pretty, whose loneliness made her not too
conventional. After several encounters on the stairs, she smiled in
response; and they crossed the Luxembourg Gardens together, strolling in
the chestnut shade and exchanging views of life.
The affair continued--charming and quite harmless--a touch of tragedy
and tears one evening--and the boy deeply touched and temporarily in
love--in love with love, temporarily embodied in this blue-eyed,
white-skinned, slender girl who had wandered with him close to the dead
line and was inclined to cross it--with him.
He had a delightfully wretched hour of renunciation--and was rewarded
with much future material, though he didn't know it at the time.
There were tears--several. It is not certain that she spiritually
appreciated the situation. That sort of gratitude seldom is genuine in
the feminine heart.
But such things are very real to the creative mind, and Cleland was far
too unhappy to sleep--deeply wallowing in martyrdom. Fate laughed and
pinned this little episode on the clothes-line to dry out with the
others--quite a little line-full, now, all fluttering gaily there and
drying in the sun. And after a proper interval Cleland wont about the
business of washing out a few more samples of experience in the life and
manners and customs of his time, later to be added to the clothes-line
wash.
He had to prod himself to write to Stephanie. He was finding it a
little difficult to discover very much to say to her. In youth two
people grow apart during absence much faster than they grow together
when in each other's company.
It was so with Cleland and Stephanie--less so with her.
Not seeing her for nearly two years left him with the unconscious
impression that she had not altered during that period--that she was
still the same young girl he had left, no more mature, no more
experienced, little wiser.
Her letters were interesting but he had lost touch, in a measure, with
interests and people at home. He had adapted himself to the new angle
of vision, to the new aspect of life, to new ideals, new aspirations.
He was at the source of inspiration, drinking frequently at times,
always unconsciously absorbing.
At the end of the two years he had no desire to return to New York.
A series of voluminous letters passed between him and Stephanie and
between him and Miss Quest.
He had plenty of excuses for remaining another year; his education was
not completed; he needed a certain atmosphere and a certain environment
which could be enjoyed only in Europe.
Of course, if he were needed in New York, etc., etc. No, he wasn't
needed. Matters could be attended to. The house in 80th Street ought
to be closed as it was a useless expense to keep the servants there.
Poor old Meacham had died; Janet, too, was dead; Lizzie had gone back to
Ireland. The house in town should, therefore, be closed and wired; and
the house in the country, "Runner's Rest," should remain closed and in
charge of the farmer who had always looked out for it.
This could be attended to; no need of his coming back.
So he wrote his directions to Stephanie and settled down again with a
sigh of relief to the golden days which promised.
His work, now deeply coloured by Gallic influence and environment, had
developed to that stage of embryonic promise marred by mannerisms and
affectations. His style, temporarily spoiled by a sort of
Franco-American jargon, became involved in the swamps of psychological
subtleties, emerging jerkily at times, or relapsing into Debussy-like
redundancy.
Nobody wanted his short stories, his poems, his impressions. Publishers
in London and in America returned "Day Dreams" and "Out of the Depths"
with polite regrets. He sounded every depth of despondency and
self-distrust; he soared on wings of hope again, striving to keep his
gaze on the blinding source of light, only to become confused and
dazzled in the upper oceans and waver and flutter and come tumbling
down, frantically beating the too rarified atmosphere with unaccustomed
wings.
Nobody could tell him. He had to find out the way. He had within him
what was worth saying; had not yet learned how to say it. The massed
testimony of the masters lay heavily undigested within him; he was too
richly fed, stuffed; the intricacies and complexities of technique
worried and disheartened him; he felt too keenly, too deeply to keep a
clear mind and a cool one.
Every sense he possessed was necessary to him in his creative work;
emotion, intense personal sympathy with his characters, his theme,
clogged, checked and halted inspiration, smothering simplicity and
clarity. This was a phase. He had the usual experience. He struggled
through it and onward.
Stephanie wrote that she had graduated, but that as her aunt was ill she
would remain for the present at the hospital.
He felt that he ought to go back. And did not. He was in a dreadfully
involved dilemma with his new novel, "Renunciation"--all about a
woman--one of the sort he never had met--and no wonder he was in a mess!
Besides that, and in spite of the gaily coloured line of rags fluttering
on the clothes-line of experience, he knew very little about women. One
day, when he came to realize that he knew nothing at all about them, he
might begin to write about them, convincingly and acceptably. But he
was not yet as far along as that in his education.
He had a desperate affair with an engaging woman of the real world--a
countess. She took excellent care of herself, had a delightful time
with Cleland, and, in gratitude, opened his eyes to the literary morass
in which he had been wading.
Clear-minded, witty, charming, very lovely to look upon, she read and
criticised what he wrote, discussed, consulted, advised, and, with
exquisite tact, divining the boy's real talent, led him deftly to solid
land again. And left him there, enchanted, miserable, inspired,
heart-broken, with a laughing admonition to be faithful to her memory
while she enjoyed her husband's new post at the Embassy in Sofia.
He wrote, after her departure, a poem simple enough for a child to
understand. And tucked it away with a ribbon and a dried flower in his
portfolio. It was the first good thing he had ever written. But he
remained unconscious of the fact for a long time.
Besides, other matters were bothering him, in particular a letter from
Miss Quest:
I am not well. I shall not be better. Still, there is no particular
hurry about your returning.
Stephanie remains with me very loyally. She has graduated; she is
equipped with a profession. She has turned into a very lovely woman to
look upon.
But that sex restlessness which now overwhelmingly obsesses the world,
possesses her. Freedom from all restraint, liberty to work out and
accomplish her own destiny, contempt of convention, utter disregard of
established formality, and hostility to custom, enroll her among the
vast army of revolutionists now demanding a revision of all laws and
customs made by one sex alone to govern the conduct of both.
You and I once conversed on this subject, if you remember. I told you
what I feared. And it has happened: Stephanie has developed along
radical lines. With everything revolutionary in the world-wide feminist
movement she is in sympathy. Standards that have been standards are no
longer so to her. To the world's conservatism she is fiercely and
youthfully hostile; equality, tolerance, liberty are the only
guide-posts she pretends to recognize.
I shall not live to see the outcome of this world-wide propaganda and
revolt. I don't want to. But, in my opinion, it takes a strong
character, already accustomed to liberty, to keep its balance in this
dazzling flood let in by opening prison doors....
I have left Stephanie what property I have outside of that invested and
endowed to maintain my Home for Defective Children. Securities have
shrunk; it is not much. It may add four thousand dollars to her present
income.
Mr. Cleland, you and Stephanie have gradually and very naturally grown
apart since your absence. I don't know what you have developed into.
But you were a nice boy.
Stephanie is a beautiful, willful, intelligent, and I fear slightly
erratic woman, alive with physical and mental vigour, restless and
sensitive under pressure of control, yet to be controlled through her
affections first, and only afterward through her reason.
These are unconventional times; a new freedom is dawning, and to me the
dawn seems threatening. I am too old, too near my end not to feel that
the old regime, with all its drawbacks, was safer for women, productive
of better results, less hazardous, less threatening.
But I don't know: I am old-fashioned except in theory. I have professed
the creed of the new feminism; I have in my time--and very
properly--denounced the tyranny and selfishness and injustice of
man-made laws which fetter and cripple my sex.
But--at heart--and with not very many days left to me--at heart I am
returning rather wearily along the way I came toward what, now to me,
seems safer. It may be only the notions of an old woman, very tired,
very sad, conscious of failure, and ready to rest and leave the
responsibility where it originated and where it belongs. I don't know.
But I wish Stephanie were not alone in the world.
Miss Quest died before the letter reached him. Stephanie's next letter
informed him of all the details. She continued:
No use your coming back until you are quite ready, Jim. There's nothing
for you to do.
I've taken a studio and apartment with Helen Davis, the animal sculptor.
I don't yet know just what I shall do. I'm likely to try several things
before I know what I ought to stick to.
Don't feel any absurd sense of responsibility for me. That would be too
silly. Feel free to remain abroad as long as it suits you. I also feel
absolutely free to go and come as I please. That's the best basis for
our friendship, Jim, and, in fact, the necessary and vital basis. My
affection is unaltered, but, somehow, it has been such a long time that
you seem almost unreal to me.
He did not sail at once. After all, in the face of such an unmistakable
declaration of independence, it did not seem worth while for him to
arouse himself from the golden lethargy of enchantment and break the
spell of Europe which held him content, amid the mellow ripeness of her
capitals and the tinted splendour of her traditions.
He wrote frequently for a few months. Then his letters lagged.
Once his pretty Countess had warned him that, for an American, Europe
was merely the school-room but his own country was the proper and only
place for creative labour.
He remembered this at intervals, a little uneasy, a trifle
conscious-stricken because he shrank from making an end to
preparation--because he still loitered, disinclined to break the golden
web and return to the clear, shadowless skies and the pitiless sun of
the real world where he belonged, and where alone, he knew, was the
workshop for which he had been so leisurely preparing.
Then the shock came--the bolt out of the blue.
The cablegram said: