"But," I cried, "they were both married!"
"What difference does that make when you love a woman?" Alec replied
grandly. "I could tell you much worse things than that."
This he proceeded to do. Fascinated, I listened with a sickening
sensation. It was a mild afternoon in spring, and we stood in the deep
limestone gutter in front of the parsonage, a little Gothic wooden house
set in a gloomy yard.
"I thought," said I, "that people couldn't love any more after they were
married, except each other."
Alec looked at me pityingly.
"You'll get over that notion," he assured me.
Thus another ingredient entered my character. Denied its food at home,
good food, my soul eagerly consumed and made part of itself the
fermenting stuff that Alec Pound so willing distributed. And it was
fermenting stuff. Let us see what it did to me. Working slowly but
surely, it changed for me the dawning mystery of sex into an evil instead
of a holy one. The knowledge of the tragedy of Grace Hollister started me
to seeking restlessly, on bookshelves and elsewhere, for a secret that
forever eluded me, and forever led me on. The word fermenting aptly
describes the process begun, suggesting as it does something closed up,
away from air and sunlight, continually working in secret, engendering
forces that fascinated, yet inspired me with fear. Undoubtedly this
secretiveness of our elders was due to the pernicious dualism of their
orthodox Christianity, in which love was carnal and therefore evil, and
the flesh not the gracious soil of the spirit, but something to be
deplored and condemned, exorcised and transformed by the miracle of
grace. Now love had become a terrible power (gripping me) whose
enchantment drove men and women from home and friends and kindred to the
uttermost parts of the earth....
It was long before I got to sleep that night after my talk with Alec
Pound. I alternated between the horror and the romance of the story I had
heard, supplying for myself the details he had omitted: I beheld the
signals from the windows, the clandestine meetings, the sudden and
desperate flight. And to think that all this could have happened in our
city not five blocks from where I lay!
My consternation and horror were concentrated on the man,--and yet I
recall a curious bifurcation. Instead of experiencing that automatic
righteous indignation which my father and mother had felt, which had
animated old Mr. Jules Hollister when he had sternly forbidden his
daughter's name to be mentioned in his presence, which had made these
people outcasts, there welled up within me an intense sympathy and pity.
By an instinctive process somehow linked with other experiences, I seemed
to be able to enter into the feelings of these two outcasts, to
understand the fearful yet fascinating nature of the impulse that had led
them to elude the vigilance and probity of a world with which I myself
was at odds. I pictured them in a remote land, shunned by mankind. Was
there something within me that might eventually draw me to do likewise?
The desire in me to which my father had referred, which would brook no
opposition, which twisted and squirmed until it found its way to its
object? I recalled the words of Jarvis, the carpenter, that if I ever set
my heart on another man's wife, God help him. God help me!
A wicked man! I had never beheld the handsome and fascinating Mr.
Jennings, but I visualised him now; dark, like all villains, with a black
moustache and snapping black eyes. He carried a cane. I always associated
canes with villains. Whereupon I arose, groped for the matches, lighted
the gas, and gazing at myself in the mirror was a little reassured to
find nothing sinister in my countenance....
Next to my father's faith in a Moral Governor of the Universe was his
belief in the Tariff and the Republican Party. And this belief, among
others, he handed on to me. On the cinder playground of the Academy we
Republicans used to wage, during campaigns, pitched battles for the
Tariff. It did not take a great deal of courage to be a Republican in our
city, and I was brought up to believe that Democrats were irrational,
inferior, and--with certain exceptions like the Hollisters--dirty beings.
There was only one degree lower, and that was to be a mugwump. It was no
wonder that the Hollisters were Democrats, for they had a queer streak in
them; owing, no doubt, to the fact that old Mr. Jules Hollister's mother
had been a Frenchwoman. He looked like a Frenchman, by the way, and
always wore a skullcap.
I remember one autumn afternoon having a violent quarrel with Gene
Hollister that bade fair to end in blows, when he suddenly
demanded:--"I'll bet you anything you don't know why you're a
Republican."
"It's because I'm for the Tariff," I replied triumphantly.
But his next question floored me. What, for example, was the Tariff? I
tried to bluster it out, but with no success.
"Do you know?" I cried finally, with sudden inspiration.
It turned out that he did not.
"Aren't we darned idiots," he asked, "to get fighting over something we
don't know anything about?"
That was Gene's French blood, of course. But his question rankled. And
how was I to know that he would have got as little satisfaction if he had
hurled it into the marching ranks of those imposing torch-light
processions which sometimes passed our house at night, with drums beating
and fifes screaming and torches waving,--thousands of citizens who were
for the Tariff for the same reason as I: to wit, because they were
Republicans.
Yet my father lived and died in the firm belief that the United States of
America was a democracy!
Resolved not to be caught a second time in such a humiliating position by
a Democrat, I asked my father that night what the Tariff was. But I was
too young to understand it, he said. I was to take his word for it that
the country would go to the dogs if the Democrats got in and the Tariff
were taken away. Here, in a nutshell, though neither he nor I realized
it, was the political instruction of the marching hordes. Theirs not to
reason why. I was too young, they too ignorant. Such is the method of
Authority!
The steel-mills of Mr. Durrett and Mr. Hambleton, he continued, would be
forced to shut down, and thousands of workmen would starve. This was just
a sample of what would happen. Prosperity would cease, he declared. That
word, Prosperity, made a deep impression on me, and I recall the certain
reverential emphasis he laid on it. And while my solicitude for the
workmen was not so great as his and Mr. Durrett's, I was concerned as to
what would happen to us if those twin gods, the Tariff and Prosperity,
should take their departure from the land. Knowing my love for the good
things of the table, my father intimated, with a rare humour I failed to
appreciate, that we should have to live henceforth in spartan simplicity.
After that, like the intelligent workman, I was firmer than ever for the
Tariff.
Such was the idealistic plane on which--and from a good man--I received
my first political instruction! And for a long time I connected the
dominance of the Republican Party with the continuation of manna and
quails, in other words, with nothing that had to do with the spiritual
welfare of any citizen, but with clothing and food and material comforts.
My education was progressing....
Though my father revered Plato and Aristotle, he did not, apparently,
take very seriously the contention that that government alone is good
"which seeks to attain the permanent interests of the governed by
evolving the character of its citizens." To put the matter brutally,
politics, despite the lofty sentiments on the transparencies in
torchlight processions, had only to do with the belly, not the soul.
Politics and government, one perceives, had nothing to do with religion,
nor education with any of these. A secularized and disjointed world! Our
leading citizens, learned in the classics though some of them might be,
paid no heed to the dictum of the Greek idealist, who was more practical
than they would have supposed. "The man who does not carry his city
within his heart is a spiritual starveling."
One evening, a year or two after that tariff campaign, I was pretending
to study my lessons under the student lamp in the sitting-room while my
mother sewed and my father wrote at his desk, when there was a ring at
the door-bell. I welcomed any interruption, even though the visitor
proved to be only the druggist's boy; and there was always the
possibility of a telegram announcing, for instance, the death of a
relative. Such had once been the case when my Uncle Avery Paret had died
in New York, and I was taken out of school for a blissful four days for
the funeral.
I went tiptoeing into the hall and peeped over the banisters while Ella
opened the door. I heard a voice which I recognized as that of Perry
Blackwood's father asking for Mr. Paret; and then to my astonishment, I
saw filing after him into the parlour some ten or twelve persons. With
the exception of Mr. Ogilvy, who belonged to one of our old families, and
Mr. Watling, a lawyer who had married the youngest of Gene Hollister's
aunts, the visitors entered stealthily, after the manner of burglars;
some of these were heavy-jowled, and all had an air of mystery that
raised my curiosity and excitement to the highest pitch. I caught hold of
Ella as she came up the stairs, but she tore herself free, and announced
to my father that Mr. Josiah Blackwood and other gentlemen had asked to
see him. My father seemed puzzled as he went downstairs.... A long
interval elapsed, during which I did not make even a pretence of looking
at my arithmetic. At times the low hum of voices rose to what was almost
an uproar, and on occasions I distinguished a marked Irish brogue.
"I wonder what they want?" said my mother, nervously.
At last we heard the front door shut behind them, and my father came
upstairs, his usually serene face wearing a disturbed expression.
"Who in the world was it, Mr. Paret?" asked my mother.
My father sat down in the arm-chair. He was clearly making an effort for
self-control.
"Blackwood and Ogilvy and Watling and some city politicians," he
exclaimed.
"Politicians!" she repeated. "What did they want? That is, if it's
anything you can tell me," she added apologetically.
"They wished me to be the Republican candidate for the mayor of this
city."
This tremendous news took me off my feet. My father mayor!
"Of course you didn't consider it, Mr. Paret," my mother was saying.
"Consider it!" he echoed reprovingly. "I can't imagine what Ogilvy and
Watling and Josiah Blackwood were thinking of! They are out of their
heads. I as much as told them so."
This was more than I could bear, for I had already pictured myself
telling the news to envious schoolmates.
"Oh, father, why didn't you take it?" I cried.
By this time, when he turned to me, he had regained his usual expression.
"You don't know what you're talking about, Hugh," he said. "Accept a
political office! That sort of thing is left to politicians."
The tone in which he spoke warned me that a continuation of the
conversation would be unwise, and my mother also understood that the
discussion was closed. He went back to his desk, and began writing again
as though nothing had happened.
As for me, I was left in a palpitating state of excitement which my
father's self-control or sang-froid only served to irritate and enhance,
and my head was fairly spinning as, covertly, I watched his pen steadily
covering the paper.
How could he--how could any man of flesh and blood sit down calmly after
having been offered the highest honour in the gift of his community! And
he had spurned it as if Mr. Blackwood and the others had gratuitously
insulted him! And how was it, if my father so revered the Republican
Party that he would not suffer it to be mentioned slightingly in his
presence, that he had refused contemptuously to be its mayor?...
The next day at school, however, I managed to let it be known that the
offer had been made and declined. After all, this seemed to make my
father a bigger man than if he had accepted it. Naturally I was asked why
he had declined it.
"He wouldn't take it," I replied scornfully. "Office-holding should be
left to politicians."
Ralph Hambleton, with his precocious and cynical knowledge of the world,
minimized my triumph by declaring that he would rather be his
grandfather, Nathaniel Durrett, than the mayor of the biggest city in the
country. Politicians, he said, were bloodsuckers and thieves, and the
only reason for holding office was that it enabled one to steal the
taxpayers' money....
As I have intimated, my vision of a future literary career waxed and
waned, but a belief that I was going to be Somebody rarely deserted me.
If not a literary lion, what was that Somebody to be? Such an environment
as mine was woefully lacking in heroic figures to satisfy the romantic
soul. In view of the experience I have just related, it is not surprising
that the notion of becoming a statesman did not appeal to me; nor is it
to be wondered at, despite the somewhat exaggerated respect and awe in
which Ralph's grandfather was held by my father and other influential
persons, that I failed to be stirred by the elements of greatness in the
grim personality of our first citizen, the iron-master. For he possessed
such elements. He lived alone in Ingrain Street in an uncompromising
mansion I always associated with the Sabbath, not only because I used to
be taken there on decorous Sunday visits by my father, but because it was
the very quintessence of Presbyterianism. The moment I entered its
"portals"--as Mr. Hawthorne appropriately would have called them--my
spirit was overwhelmed and suffocated by its formality and orderliness.
Within its stern walls Nathaniel Durrett had made a model universe of his
own, such as the Deity of the Westminster Confession had no doubt meant
his greater one to be if man had not rebelled and foiled him.... It was a
world from which I was determined to escape at any cost.
My father and I were always ushered into the gloomy library, with its
high ceiling, with its long windows that reached almost to the rococo
cornice, with its cold marble mantelpiece that reminded me of a
tombstone, with its interminable book shelves filled with yellow
bindings. On the centre table, in addition to a ponderous Bible, was one
of those old-fashioned carafes of red glass tipped with blue surmounted
by a tumbler of blue tipped with red. Behind this table Mr. Durrett sat
reading a volume of sermons, a really handsome old man in his black tie
and pleated shirt; tall and spare, straight as a ramrod, with a finely
moulded head and straight nose and sinewy hands the colour of mulberry
stain. He called my father by his first name, an immense compliment,
considering how few dared to do so.
"Well, Matthew," the old man would remark, after they had discussed Dr.
Pound's latest flight on the nature of the Trinity or the depravity of
man, or horticulture, or the Republican Party, "do you have any better
news of Hugh at school?"
"I regret to say, Mr. Durrett," my father would reply, "that he does not
yet seem to be aroused to a sense of his opportunities."
Whereupon Mr. Durrett would gimble me with a blue eye that lurked beneath
grizzled brows, quite as painful a proceeding as if he used an iron tool.
I almost pity myself when I think of what a forlorn stranger I was in
their company. They two, indeed, were of one kind, and I of another sort
who could never understand them,--nor they me. To what depths of despair
they reduced me they never knew, and yet they were doing it all for my
good! They only managed to convince me that my love of folly was
ineradicable, and that I was on my way head first for perdition. I always
looked, during these excruciating and personal moments, at the coloured
glass bottle.
"It grieves me to hear it, Hugh," Mr. Durrett invariably declared.
"You'll never come to any good without study. Now when I was your age..."
I knew his history by heart, a common one in this country, although he
made an honourable name instead of a dishonourable one. And when I
contrast him with those of his successors whom I was to know later...!
But I shall not anticipate. American genius had not then evolved the
false entry method of overcapitalization. A thrilling history, Mr.
Durrett's, could I but have entered into it. I did not reflect then that
this stern old man must have throbbed once; nay, fire and energy still
remained in his bowels, else he could not have continued to dominate a
city. Nor did it occur to me that the great steel-works that lighted the
southern sky were the result of a passion, of dreams similar to those
possessing me, but which I could not express. He had founded a family
whose position was virtually hereditary, gained riches which for those
days were great, compelled men to speak his name with a certain awe. But
of what use were such riches as his when his religion and morality
compelled him to banish from him all the joys in the power of riches to
bring?
No, I didn't want to be an iron-master. But it may have been about this
time that I began to be impressed with the power of wealth, the adulation
and reverence it commanded, the importance in which it clothed all who
shared in it....
The private school I attended in the company of other boys with whom I
was brought up was called Densmore Academy, a large, square building of a
then hideous modernity, built of smooth, orange-red bricks with threads
of black mortar between them. One reads of happy school days, yet I fail
to recall any really happy hours spent there, even in the yard, which was
covered with black cinders that cut you when you fell. I think of it as a
penitentiary, and the memory of the barred lower windows gives substance
to this impression.
I suppose I learned something during the seven years of my incarceration.
All of value, had its teachers known anything of youthful psychology, of
natural bent, could have been put into me in three. At least four
criminally wasted years, to say nothing of the benumbing and desiccating
effect of that old system of education! Chalk and chalk-dust! The
Mediterranean a tinted portion of the map, Italy a man's boot which I
drew painfully, with many yawns; history no glorious epic revealing as it
unrolls the Meaning of Things, no revelation of that wondrous
distillation of the Spirit of man, but an endless marching and
counter-marching up and down the map, weary columns of figures to be
learned by rote instantly to be forgotten again. "On June the 7th General
So-and-so proceeded with his whole army--" where? What does it matter?
One little chapter of Carlyle, illuminated by a teacher of understanding,
were worth a million such text-books. Alas, for the hatred of Virgil!
"Paret" (a shiver), "begin at the one hundred and thirtieth line and
translate!" I can hear myself droning out in detestable English a
meaningless portion of that endless journey of the pious AEneas; can see
Gene Hollister, with heart-rending glances of despair, stumbling through
Cornelius Nepos in an unventilated room with chalk-rubbed blackboards and
heavy odours of ink and stale lunch. And I graduated from Densmore
Academy, the best school in our city, in the 80's, without having been
taught even the rudiments of citizenship.
Knowledge was presented to us as a corpse, which bit by bit we painfully
dissected. We never glimpsed the living, growing thing, never experienced
the Spirit, the same spirit that was able magically to waft me from a
wintry Lyme Street to the South Seas, the energizing, electrifying Spirit
of true achievement, of life, of God himself. Little by little its flames
were smothered until in manhood there seemed no spark of it left alive.
Many years were to pass ere it was to revive again, as by a miracle. I
travelled. Awakening at dawn, I saw, framed in a port-hole, rose-red
Seriphos set in a living blue that paled the sapphire; the seas Ulysses
had sailed, and the company of the Argonauts. My soul was steeped in
unimagined colour, and in the memory of one rapturous instant is gathered
what I was soon to see of Greece, is focussed the meaning of history,
poetry and art. I was to stand one evening in spring on the mound where
heroes sleep and gaze upon the plain of Marathon between darkening
mountains and the blue thread of the strait peaceful now, flushed with
pink and white blossoms of fruit and almond trees; to sit on the
cliff-throne whence a Persian King had looked down upon a Salamis fought
and lost.... In that port-hole glimpse a Themistocles was revealed, a
Socrates, a Homer and a Phidias, an AEschylus, and a Pericles; yes, and a
John brooding Revelations on his sea-girt rock as twilight falls over the
waters....
I saw the Roman Empire, that Scarlet Woman whose sands were dyed crimson
with blood to appease her harlotry, whose ships were laden with treasures
from the immutable East, grain from the valley of the Nile, spices from
Arabia, precious purple stuffs from Tyre, tribute and spoil, slaves and
jewels from conquered nations she absorbed; and yet whose very emperors
were the unconscious instruments of a Progress they wot not of, preserved
to the West by Marathon and Salamis. With Caesar's legions its message
went forth across Hispania to the cliffs of the wild western ocean,
through Hercynian forests to tribes that dwelt where great rivers roll up
their bars by misty, northern seas, and even to Celtic fastnesses beyond
the Wall....