"Your short letter answering my long one has been read and reread and
read again. I know it by heart. Everything you say's true--and isn't.
I'll try to explain that--for I can't bear you to be doubting me. You
are, Phil. I don't blame you, but I do blame myself--for complacency.
I've taken too much for granted, as I always do with you and Ambo. You
see, I know so intensely that you and Ambo are pure
gold--incorruptible!--that I couldn't possibly question anything you
might say or do--the fineness of the motive, I mean. If you did murder
and were hanged for it, and even if I'd no clue as to why you struck--I
should know all the time you must have done it because, for some
concealed reason, under circumstances dark to the rest of us, your clear
eyes marked it as the one possible right thing to do.
"Yes, I trust you like that, Phil; you and Ambo and Sister and Jimmy.
Think of trusting four people like that! How rich I am! And you can't
know how passionately grateful! For it isn't blind trusting at all. In
each one of you I've touched a soul of goodness. There's no other name
for it. It's as simple as fresh air. You're good--you four--good from
the center. But, Phil dear, a little secret to comfort you--just between
us and the stars: So, mostly, am I.
"Truly, Phil, I'm ridiculously good at the center, and most of the way
out. There are things I simply can't do, no matter how much I'd like to;
and lots of oozy, opally things I simply can't like at all. I'm with you
so far, at least--peacock-proud to be! But we're tremendously different,
all the same. It's really this, I think: You're a Puritan, by instinct
and cultivation; and I'm not. The clever ones down here, you know, spend
most of their spare time swearing by turns at Puritanism and the
Victorian Era. Their favorite form of exercise is patting themselves on
the back, and this is one of their subtler ways of doing it. But they
just rampantly rail; they don't--though they think they do--understand.
They mix up every _passe_ narrowness and bigotry and hypocrisy and
sentimental cant in one foul stew, and then rush from it, with held
noses, screaming "Puritanism! _Faugh!_" Well, it does, Phil--their stew!
So, often, for that matter--and to high heaven--do the clever ones!
"But it isn't Puritanism, the real thing. You see, I know the real
thing--for I know you. Ignorance, bigotry, hypocrisy,
sentimentalism--such things have no part in your life. And yet you're a
Puritan, and I'm not. Something divides us where we are most alike. What
is it, Phil?
"May I tell you? I almost dare believe I've puzzled it out.
"You're a simon-Puritan, dear, because you won't trust that central
goodness, your own heart; the very thing in you on whose virgin-goldness
I would stake my life! You won't trust it in yourself; and when you find
it in others, you don't fully trust it in them. You've purged your
philosophy of Original Sin, but it still secretly poisons the marrow of
your bones. You guard your soul's strength as possible
weakness--something that might vanish suddenly, at a pinch. How silly of
you! For it's the _you_-est you, the thing you can never change or
escape. Instead of worrying over yourself or others--me?--you could
safely spread yourself, Phil dear, all over the landscape, lie back in
the lap of Mother Earth and twiddle your toes and smile! Walt Whitman's
way! He may have overdone it now and then, posed about it; but I'm on
his side, not yours. It's heartier--human-er--more fun! Yes, Master
Puritan--more fun! That's a life value you've mostly missed. But it's
never too late, Phil, for a genuine cosmic spree.
"Now I've done scolding back at you for scolding at me.--But I loved
your sermon. I hope you won't shudder over mine?"
V
The above too-cryptic letter badly needs authoritative annotation, which
I now proceed to give you--at perilous length. But it will lead us
far....
* * * * *
Though it is positively not true that Phil and I, having covenanted on a
hands-off policy, were independently hoping for the worst, so far as
Susan's ability to cope unaided with New York was concerned;
nevertheless, the ease with which she made her way there, found her feet
without us and danced ahead, proved for some reason oddly disturbing to
us both. Here was a child, of high talents certainly, perhaps of
genius--the like, at least, of whose mental precocity we had never met
with in any other daughter--much less, son--of Eve! A woman, for we so
loved her, endowed as are few women; yet assuredly a child, for she had
but just counted twenty years on earth. And being men of careful
maturity, once Susan had left us, our lonely anxieties fastened upon
this crying fact of her youth; it was her youth, her inexperience, that
made her venture suddenly pathetic and dreadful to us, made us yearn to
watch over her, warn her of pitfalls, guide her steps.
True, she was not alone. Miss Goucher was admirable in her way; though
a middle-aged spinster, after all, unused to the sharp temptations and
fierce competitions of metropolitan life. It was not a house-mother
Susan would need; the wolves lurked beyond the door--shrewd,
soft-treading wolves, cunningly disguised. How could a child, a charming
and too daring child--however gifted--be expected to deal with these
creatures? The thought of these subtle, these patient ones, tracking
her--tracking her--chilled us to hours-long wakefulness in the night!
Then with the morning a letter would come, filled with strange men's
names.
We compared notes, consulted together--shaking unhappy heads. We wrote
tactful letters to Heywood Sampson, begging him, but always indirectly,
to keep an eye. We ran down singly for nights in town, rescued--the verb
was ours--Susan and Miss Goucher from their West 10th Street
boarding-house, interfered with their work or other plans, haled
them--the verb, I fear, was theirs--to dinner, to the opera or theater,
or perhaps to call on someone of ribbed respectability who might prove
an observant friend. God knows, in spite of all resolutions, we did our
poor best to mind Susan's business for her, to brood over her destiny
from afar!
And God knows our efforts were superfluous! The traps, stratagems,
springes in her path, merely suspected by us and hence the more darkly
dreaded, were clearly seen by Susan and laughed at for the ancient,
pitiful frauds they were. The dull craft, the stale devices of avarice
or lust were no novelties to her; she greeted them, _en passant_, with
the old Birch Street terrier-look; just a half-mocking nod of
recognition--an amused, half-wistful salute to her gamin past. It was
her gamin past we had forgotten, Phil and I, when we agonized over
Susan's inexperienced youth. Inexperienced? Bob Blake's kid! If there
were things New York could yet teach Bob Blake's kid--and there were
many--they were not those that had made her see in it "Birch Street--on
a slightly exaggerated scale"!
But, as the Greeks discovered many generations ago, it is impossible to
be high-minded or clear-sighted enough to outwit a secret unreason in
the total scheme of things. Else the virtuous, in the Greek sense, would
be always the fortunate; and perhaps then would grow too self-regarding.
Does the last and austerest beauty of the ideal not flower from this,
that it can promise us nothing but itself! You can choose a clear road,
yet you shall never walk there in safety: Chance--that secret
unreason--lurks in the hedgerows, myriad-formed, to plot against you.
"_Helas!_" as the French heroine might say. "Diddle-diddle-dumpling!" as
might say Susan.... Meaning: That strain, Ambo, was of a higher mood,
doubtless; but do return to your muttons.
Susan had reached New York late in November, 1913, and the letter to
Phil dates from the following January. Barely two months had passed
since her first calls upon Maltby and Heywood Sampson, but every day of
that period had been made up of crowded hours. Of the three
manufactured-in-advance articles for the Garden Ex., Maltby had accepted
one, paying thirty dollars for it, half-rate--Susan's first professional
earnings; but the manner of his acceptance had convinced Susan it was a
mere stroke of personal diplomacy on his part. He did not wish to
encourage her as a business associate, for Maltby kept his business
activities rigidly separate from what he held to be his life; neither
did he wish to offend her. What he wholly desired was to draw her into
the immediate circles he frequented as a social being, where he could
act as her patron on a scale at once more brilliant and more impressive.
So far as the Garden Ex. was concerned, his attitude from the first had
been one of sympathetic discouragement. Susan hit off his manner
perfectly in an earlier letter:
"'My dear Susan! You can write very delicate,
distinctive verse, no doubt, and all that--and of
course there's a fairly active market for verse
nowadays, and I can put you in touch with some
little magazines, _a cote_, that print such
things, and even occasionally pay for them.
They're your field, I'm convinced. But, frankly, I
can't see you quite as one of our
contributors--and I couldn't pay you a higher
compliment!
"'You don't suppose, do you, I sit here like an
old-fashioned editor, reading voluntary
contributions? No, my dear girl; I have a small,
well-broken staff of writers, and I tell them what
to write. If I find myself, for example, with a
lot of parade interiors taken in expensive homes,
I select four or five, turn 'em over to
Abramovitz, and tell him to do us something on
"The More Dignified Dining-Room" or "The Period
Salon, a Study in Restfulness." Abramovitz knows
exactly what to say, and how to point the
snobbish-but-not-too-snobbish captions and feature
the best names. I've no need to experiment, you
see. I count on Abramovitz. Just so with other
matters. Here's an article, now, on "The Flaunting
Paeony." Skeat did that, of course. It's signed
"Winifred Snow"--all his flower-and-sundial stuff
is--and it couldn't be better! I don't even have
to read it.
"'Well, there you are! I'm simply a purveyor of
standardized goods in standardized packages. Dull
work, but it pays.'
"'Exactly!' I struck in. 'It pays! That's why I'm
interested. Sister and Togo and I need the
money!'"
As for the brilliant, intertwined circles frequented by Maltby as a
social being, within which, he hoped to persuade Susan, lay true
freedom, while habit slyly bound her with invisible chains--well, they
are a little difficult to describe. Taken generally, we may think of
them as the Artistic Smart Set. Maltby's acquaintance was wide,
penetrating in many directions; but he felt most at home among those
iridescent ones of earth whose money is as easy as their morals, and
whose ruling passion for amusement is at least directed by aesthetic
sensibilities and vivacious brains.
Within Maltby's intersecting circles were to be found, then, many a
piquant contrast, many an anomalous combination. There the young,
emancipated society matron, of fattest purse and slenderest figure,
expressed her sophisticated paganism through interpretative dancing; and
there the fashionable painter of portraits, solidly arrived, exhibited
her slender figure on a daring canvas--made possible by the fatness of
her purse--at one of his peculiarly intimate studio teas. There the
reigning _ingenue_, whose graceful _diablerie_ in imagined situations on
the stage was equalled only by her roguish effrontery in more real, if
hardly less public situations off, played up to the affluent
_amateur_--patron of all arts that require an unblushing cooeperation
from pretty young women. There, in short, all were welcome who liked the
game and were not hampered in playing it by dull inhibitions, material
or immaterial. It was Bohemia _de luxe_--Bohemia in the same sense that
Marie Antoinette's dairy-farm was Arcady.
That Susan--given her doting guardian, her furs, her Chow, her
shadowy-gleaming, imaginative charm, her sharp audacities of
speech--would bring a new and seductive personality to this perpetual
carnival was Maltby's dream; she was predestined--he had long suspected
the tug of that fate upon her--to shine there by his side. He best could
offer the cup, and her gratitude for its heady drafts of life would be
merely his due. It was an exciting prospect; it promised much; and it
only remained to intoxicate Susan with the wine of an unguessed freedom.
This, Maltby fondly assured himself, would prove no difficult task. Life
was life, youth was youth, joy was joy; their natural affinities were
all on his side and would play into his practiced hands.
Doubtless Phil and I must have agreed with him--from how differently
anxious a spirit!--but all three of us would then have proved quite
wrong. To intoxicate Susan, Maltby did find a difficult, in the end an
impossible, task. He took her--not unwilling to enter and appraise any
circle from high heaven to nether hell--to all the right, magical
places, exposed her to all the heady influences of his world; and she
found them enormously stimulating--to her sense of the ironic. Maltby's
sensuous, quick-witted friends simply would not come true for Susan when
she first moved among them; they were not serious about anything but
refined sensation and she could not take their refined sensations
seriously; but for a time they amused her, and she relished them much as
Charles Lamb relished the belles and rakes of Restoration Drama: "They
are a world of themselves almost as much as fairyland."
To their intimate dinners, their intimate musical evenings, their
intimate studio revels--she came on occasion with Maltby as to a play:
"altogether a speculative scene of things." She could, in those early
weeks, have borrowed Lamb's words for her own comedic detachment: "We
are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages. No
reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings--for they have
none among them. No peace of families is violated--for no family ties
exist among them.... No deep affections are disquieted, no holy-wedlock
bands are snapped asunder--for affection's depth and wedded faith are
not the growth of that soil. There is neither right nor wrong.... Of
what consequence is it to Virtue or how is she at all concerned?... The
whole thing is a passing pageant."
It is probable that Maltby at first mistook her interest in the
spectacle for the preliminary stirrings of its spell within her; but he
must soon have been aware--for he had intelligence--that Susan was not
precisely flinging herself among his maskers with the thrilled abandon
that would betoken surrender. She was not afraid of these clever,
beauty-loving maskers, some of whom bore celebrated names; it was not
timidity that restrained her; she, too, loved beauty and lilting wit and
could feel joyously at ease among them--for an hour or two--once in a
while. But to remain permanently within those twining circles, held to a
limited dream, when she was conscious of wilder, freer, more adventurous
spaces without----! Why should she narrow her sympathies like that? It
never occurred to her as a temptation to do so. She had drunk of a
headier cup, and had known a vaster intoxication. From the magic circle
of her cedar trees, in that lonely abandoned field back of Mount Carmel,
the imagination of her heart had long since streamed outward beyond all
such passing pageants, questing after a dream that does not pass....
No gilded nutshell could bound her now; she could become the slave of no
_intersected_ ring.... Lesser incantations were powerless.
So much, then, for my own broad annotation of Susan's letter to Phil!
But I leave you with generalizations, when your interest is in concrete
fact. Patience. In my too fumbling way I am ready for you there, as
well.